RockShox Revelation 426
by: Jason Rider
Posted on: Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:12 am by: Jason Rider
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A professional review of the Rock Shox Revelation 426 mountain bike fork.
Since its inception, the all mountain or aggressive trail bike category has quickly become the leader in market share due to its versatility and competitive pricing. With this popularity comes a wide variety of after market components. Rock Shox has been quick to embrace this trend. We recently spent some time with their impressive Revelation 426 air-sprung fork in effort to assess its all mountain prowess.
Uniqueness
The Revelation 426 attempts to combine cross-country style weight shavings with the type of stiffness all mountain riding demands. Rock Shox accomplishes these two opposing goals by designing beefy 32mm stanchions and coupling them to an internal air spring. Features include an all-new chassis design optimized for the fork’s maximum 130mm of travel. Stiffness is achieved through 32mm straight wall aluminum upper tubes and a forged 6061 T6 aluminum crown with an integrated remote cable stop. A butted aluminum steerer tube and all aluminum external control knobs round out the package. Our fork offered the Air U-Turn spring option with Motion Control damping and adjustable Floodgate control. To be sure our test focused exclusively on the fork’s performance, we mounted it to a Felt Q620 hard-tail and took it out to the slushy trails of Buffalo, NY for a lashing.
The Set Up
Setting up the Rock Shox Revelation 426 can be a bit of a challenge initially. With external rebound, compression, Floodgate, and Lockout, plus a PushLoc remote, and Motion Control damping dial, there are quite a few variables to tune. Fortunately this type of customization is considered a major benefit in the rough and tumble world of mountain bike suspension despite some initial confusing moments. Once dialed in however, this is a relatively “set and forget” style component. The only adjustments we made once dialing it in to our weights and conditions was the U-Turn height adjustment, which goes from 100 to 130 mm of suspension travel on the fly. All told, the Rock Shox Revelation weighs in at 3.6 pounds, which is exceptional considering its big hit capabilities and sheer size.
The Ride
Once installed and tuned in, we hit the trails to determine the 426’s strengths and weaknesses. For starters, the suspension travel is very active, especially at picking up and absorbing small terrain imperfections and obstacles. For XC use we would have likely taken out a bit more compression allowing the fork to use more of its supple travel on these small trail conditions. As it stood, we were looking for a bit more multi-use ride performance and followed the manual’s settings to the letter. For all mountain riding, the Rock Shox 426 is easily on par with the pricier (and only slightly less weighing) Fox Racing Shox forks. While the low speed damping is average, the fork really excels once the speeds pick up and the terrain begins to become more demanding. Here the fork tends to sit higher in its travel, returning to full extension immediately after hammering through the roughest of roots, rocks, and chop. The 426 transfers very little impact to the rider’s wrists and allows the front wheel to track straight even on slippery off cambers. About the only complaint we encountered during our time with the fork was its tendency to dive down and pack up upon hard impact. The supple small-bump absorption we raved about in the beginning comes back to bite the fork on flat landings. Despite this, we were still unable to find the very bottom limits of the travel. A quick ramping of the spring rate pays off even if the fork’s ability to rebound lacks slightly.
Conclusion
All in all the Rock Shox Revelation 426 offers some serious bang for the buck. Durability and build quality are second to none and the on-trail performance rivaled that of forks costing twice as much. For more information, head over to: http://www.sram.com
