Lauf Forks Trail Racer 27.5" in Review
Hello everyone. For my first blog post I am going to do a review on Lauf Forks TR 27.5" suspension fork.
It
was February 2015 when I first heard about a new fork design that had
hit the mountain bike market. I was very interested with Lauf Forks new
design of a suspension front fork. I was in contact with Benedikt
Skulason the CEO and Founder of Lauf Forks and asked him how he thought
the fork would perform on XCO and XCM races. Skulason then gave me the
opportunity to test and review the Trail Racer 27.5" fork that they had
in production. Once the fork arrived I installed it on my Norco Revolver
HT and found that the brake cable clips that came with it did not hold
the brake line well enough. I contacted Skulason about the clips and he
suggested I use tie wraps. Now I see they are sending tie wraps with
their new 2016 boost forks, which is way better.
For the
first test ride I went to Joyride 150, which is a great indoor bike park
down in Markham, Ontario. I was really looking forward to seeing how
the fork would handle since I am used to the conventional air/spring
forks. The first big thing I noticed was that the fork was lighter, the
weight of the TR 27.5" is sub 990 grams which is 575 grams lighter then
my old fork. The light weight helped on the more technical riding
situations like pop up's and rock gardens. The fork has 60mm of travel
so I had to ride light and absorb more on the drops and jumps, but
I never compressed the full 60mm. I found that it traveled over the
small bumps smoothly and did not transfer any chatter to the handle
bars, which was really nice. The first ride on the fork was great and it
performed well above my expectations.
The next test was a
60km marathon, my first race of the year. I only got to ride on the fork
a few times since my test ride at Joyride 150 as there was still a lot
of snow on the ground. I talked to a lot of people about the fork and
some thought that it would have a pogo affect. This would be a good race
to test that out on. When I was out on the trail I didn't find that was
the case at all. The race course had quite a few logs that I had to
bunny hop so the lightness of the fork was a
huge benefit. For the first race it performed perfect and I felt that it gave me an advantage over my previous fork.
Through out the year I rode many miles of various terrain and tested
the fork out on some very technical features. The fork took anything
that I threw at it. One of the best things about the fork is that it
gets progressively stiffer the more you compress it. I was able to go
over small bumps
with little impact while at the same time I
was able to go over big drops and not compress the entire 60mm. Another
thing that I noticed was that when you are on the bike the fork
compresses slightly, so when you are riding the front wheel always has
pressure to the ground. It allows
the front wheel to be in
contact with the ground more when going over bumps. This allows you to
corner harder and not worry about slipping out. Near the end of my race
season I found that the fork had softened up a bit due to wear, but it
was not enough to affect the overall performance. For 2016 Lauf Forks
have upgraded their S2 Glass fiber springs so they should not soften up.
Overall I was very pleased with the performance of the TR 27.5" fork.
I would definitely recommend this fork to cross country riders to try.
The weight difference and handling would be beneficial to any rider.
I just received Lauf Forks new TR Boost fork so we will have to see how it performs this 2016 race season.
Posted By: Nick Emsley
