I love riding my full rigid Avanti KISS 29er however after a few hours on the trails it does beat me up a bit.
Thanks to the great info available from Guitar Ted at twentynineinches.com I decided to fit a set of carbon tube rigid forks to soften up some of the sharper hits.
There are a few options to choose from, without going into the reasons too deeply I went for a set of ‘exotic’ branded ebay specials.
The non-suspension corrected geometry of the KISS 29er means you need a shorter fork than most other 29ers. The standard crown to axle height is 430mm and the offset is 40mm.
The fork I chose is 445mm crown to axle and offset is 42mm so I expect the handling will be fairly similar, if anything a tad slower which is not a problem as these bikes do have fairly quick handling (so I’m told).
Anyway the fork arrived and has been fitted, nothing to tricky there just needed to get a star nut and cut down the steerer tube. I used the original fork tube length as a guide but added an extra 15mm for added setup options.
So far I have only done about 20km trail work at Gap Creek with the new fork but the upgrade seems well worth it. The most noticable things are a general dulling of the sharp hits from trail bumps, the feedback and geometry seem pretty good, however it’s a bit too early to give a full wrap.
While researching I created a quick speadsheet of the contenders, hope you find it useful.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pHGMkOT8YA5pU3Vho4uUXAQ&output=html
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