Read this before you touch an adjuster

A clicker cannot fix something that was never a damping problem. Three things sit underneath every suspension setting, and all three are free to check. Riders skip them because they are boring, then spend a month chasing a fault that was one of them.

Your bike's page in the app carries its own cold pressure figures, front and rear, so you are checking against the maker's number rather than a rule of thumb from a forum.

Preload sets ride height, not stiffness. It changes how far the spring is already squeezed when the bike is standing there, so it changes where the bike sits under you. It does not make the spring itself any harder. That one sentence is the most useful thing on this page, and it is the reason the app leads with preload rather than with a clicker.

Sag is how you check it. Sag is how far the bike settles when you sit on it in your gear, and the useful way to think about it is as a budget: it is the distance the wheel still has to drop into a dip before the suspension runs out of extension. Set the bike too high and the wheel cannot follow the road down. Set it too low and the travel is gone before the bump is.

So preload is the adjustment and sag is the measurement that tells you whether you got it right. How to measure sag →

A sag window depends on how much travel your bike has, and what counts as correct depends on your weight, your gear and whether anyone is on the back. That is why no figure is printed here: it would be right for somebody and quietly wrong for you, and a printed number is the kind a rider obeys.

So the numbers live where they can be worked out for the actual machine. Pick your make, then your model, then your version, and the app carries that bike's adjusters, its cold pressures and its sag window. Add a rider profile with your weight and load, and the window becomes yours rather than the catalogue's.

Getting the version right matters more than it sounds. It usually decides which adjusters exist at all, and it is what stops the app recommending a screw your bike does not have.

You do not have to translate what you felt into suspension language before you start. Harsh over bumps, wallowing, bottoming, the rear kicking, a shake through the bars, running wide in a corner. Plain words, nothing measured first.

Then one or two short follow-ups, usually which end you feel it at and what the road was doing. Each answer removes whole families of causes rather than nudging a score, which is what keeps the answer short instead of giving you a list of everything.

Skipping a question is a real answer. It widens the list a little and costs you nothing else. A guess would be worse, because the engine would reason confidently from something that never happened.

The causes come back ranked, each one saying what to change, which way, and what you should feel afterwards. Riders reasonably ask how it knew, so here is the honest answer.

It is a rule set, hand written from suspension engineering and from what tuners publish, not a model that guessed from data. Every symptom has an ordered list of causes behind it. Your answers cut that list down, your bike decides which of the survivors are even possible, and your load and riding style decide the order of what is left. Nothing is recommended for an adjuster your bike does not have.

Setup, or the way you rode it

Some of what a motorcycle does is the rider, and a sharp input can make a wheel skip on a bike that is set up perfectly well. So technique appears as its own kind of card, offered alongside the mechanical causes and never instead of them. It is information, not a telling off, and it never outranks a fault in the bike.

The same goes the other way. If a card says go and look at something rather than adjust it, that is the important card on the list. And when nothing rider adjustable is left, the app says so and points you at a specialist instead of inventing another click to try.

Make one change, then go and ride it. The same roads if you can, because what you are comparing against is the bike as it was twenty minutes ago. Two changes and one ride tells you nothing about which of them did what.

Then answer the only question that matters:

All of it is kept per bike, with the load and the rider it was for. That record is what makes the app worth having after the first fix: next spring, or on your next bike, you are not starting from nothing.