Description
Mountain Bike Suspension Bushes Stainless Steel 1/2″ x 1/2″ (12.7mm x 12.7mm) – 6mm, 8mm and 10mm bore. Manufactured by Profin Components.
Why Steel?
Numerous mountain bike suspension bushes 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 were made from all of the aforementioned materials and subjected 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 by 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. The tolerance on the outer diameter of the 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.
Which width of MTB Shock Bushing 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.
Want to lower B/B height and slacken head angle ?
We have offset bushes in a small number of sizes, please call 087 7159459 for more info.
Thanks Richie