Offset Bushings Stainless Steel – (12.7mm x 12.7mm) – 6mm, 8mm and 10mm bore available
Manufactured by Profin Components.
- ****You absolutely need a DU bush tool to fit these, don’t attempt to press them in with a socket, you will split the poly bush, the tool can be found on our site.
- Each kit contains 2 x spacers, 1 x low friction poly bushing and stainless steel mounting hardware. If you want to change the shock hardware in 2 x shock eyelets you will need to order 2 kits.
Why Steel?
Numerous shock mounting kits are available on the market made from materials such as anodised aluminium, brass, steel and grade 5 titanium – the aim was to produce the hardest wearing kits at the most attractive price of any retailer.
All of the premium brands over the World choose either Stainless Steel, Titanium or hard Anodised Aluminium Alloy with industry giants Fox offering Stainless Steel in addition to their lower priced anodised alloy kits.
Prototypes from all of the aforementioned materials and subjected them to months of real world testing with various riders around the U.K. Of course there is readily available data for all of those materials online for tensile strength, Rockwell hardness, density and so forth but our concern as mountainbikers is the partial rotation backwards and forwards within the shock eyelet bushing and how well the material holds up before changes to the critical outside diameter are noted. The two class leaders in this department are 303 Stainless Steel followed Grade 5 Titanium.
Titanium has a weight advantage over stainless steel but for perspective a 22mm x 8mm stainless bushing weighs 13g to 7.5g for a Grade 5 Titanium equivalent. However even though Titanium has a greater tensile strength it scratches and wears more quickly than Stainless Steel, we decided that a rider was unlikely to notice a 5.5g weight difference but they would notice when they had to change their hardware. We settled on Steel.
So if Stainless Steel is so great why isn’t everyone using it?
The only real issue with stainless steel is how difficult it is to machine. Even free machining 303 Stainless Steel is hard on tooling. Tool breakages and tool wear significantly add to production time and cost. Our tolerance on the outer diameter of our stainless steel parts is +/-0.005mm, extremely tight, to ensure that the part fits correctly in the eyelet bushing and is free to rotate without play. That kind of tolerance is difficult to maintain, even more so when working with stainless steel.
Investment to reduce the cost
The reason that our shock bushing kits are the most competitively priced on the market, despite being made of stainless steel is because we have invested heavily in machinery and process. We manufacture in quantities of thousands, not tens, this ensures that we have stock ready to dispatch and keeps the cost down for our customers.
Why fit Offset Shock Mounting Hardware – what difference will it make?
Offset bushings allow you to change the geometry of your bike to dial in handling to your preference. The vast majority of riders will use offset bushings to slacken the geometry of their bike and lower the bottom bracket.
This will have the effect of increasing stability on fast and rugged descents and can make your steering much more predictable.
Conversely you can use offset bushings to raise the bottom bracket and steepen the head angle. Some riders may benefit from this if say they have fitted a fork that, whilst within the frame manufacturer’s specified limits, has a longer axle to crown length than their previous fork. Raising the bottom bracket will increase ground clearance (beneficial if pedal strikes are an issue) and steepening the head angle will speed up the steering.
How much of a difference will Offset Shock Mounting Hardware make to my Bike’s Geometry?
There is no definitive answer to this as every frame design is different. 6mm 8mm and 10mm bushings have a 3mm, 2mm and 1mm offset each respectively.
The amount of offset possible is limited by the bolt diameter in the 12.7mm hardware, hence why 10mm hardware has a 1mm offset.
That said the range of adjustment is significant enough to be very noticable in all sizes. Typically you can expect the following average amount of head angle adjustment with a pair of offset mounting kits:
- Offset Shock Mounting Hardware Steel 6mm – 0.65 degree to 1.00 degree.
- Offset Shock Mounting Hardware Steel 8mm – 0.4 degree to 1.00 degree.
- Offset Shock Mounting Hardware Steel 10mm – 0.2 degree to 0.25 degree.
The above figures are an average based upon a range of makes and models.
If your rear shock only takes one set of mounting hardware, for example a Trek/Fox DRCV you can expect to halve those figures.
What width of Offset Shock Mounting Hardware should I buy?
You can either check the manufacturer’s tech sheets to see if they have published the size for your bike or preferably just measure them yourself with a vernier gauge, you won’t be able to get an accurate reading with a tape measure.
If in doubt please give a shout 087 7159459