A two pronged approach

Early on in its life, my Cinder Cone was running the awesome Kona Project II rigid forks. So good are these forks that Kona still make them today under high demand! After a few years however I ended up buying a set of RST 381's - admittedly this may have been due to the yellow colour matching the Kona's decals.... I know - that is no reason to choose forks... but hey - I was young!

Anyhow, the RST's have had their day - in fact they were never really very good anyway. They tended to always top out when lifting the front wheel fast. So now I've gone and bought myself some nice spanking new RockShox Revelation 426 Dual Air Forks (picture courtesy of SRAM).

Now I'd done quite a bit of reading up on these forks - and was pleased to see a full review of the lower spec version in the June 2006 edition of Mountain Bike Rider. It got a 9/10 rating and only lost out to the Fox Vanilla R in the group test based on ease of use - i.e. setting it all up before and in between rides. That's no problem for me - I like the fact that this fork has more settings to make your ride just right! What's more is that I got it for a bargain price on - yes you guessed it - eBay! I paid £200 for them when other online stores had them for more like £300 - £400!!

I'll give it a proper review once its been fitted - but at the moment I'm waiting on other parts to turn up - e.g. the headset! Hopefully there won't be too much of a change to the ride geometry with the different fork length... one thing I have noticed now that its arrived is that the tubing looks quite oversized compared to the old-school style on the Cinder Cone frame. I hope it doesn't look too out of place!