User Guide

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don’t have the inherent stress (and stress
risers) of welding. This clever design avoids
fatigue stress.
More durable pivots
One last concern of our engineers was
pivot durability and maintenance. Although
you may not appreciate it on a test ride,
pivot durability plays an important role after
you’ve owned the bike for a while. As sus-
pension pivots wear, they become loose. This
looseness translates into frame flex, or “wag”,
which can allow the two wheels to track inde-
pendently. You don’t want this. In addition,
worn pivots tend to squeak. Nothing is more
annoying than listening to your bike squeak
with every pedal stroke. So Fisher engineers
borrowed technology from the thousands of
proven Fisher full suspension bikes on the
trail; Teflon impregnated composite bearings.
In the Sugar+ design, the bearings ride
on very wide axles. The distance between
the bearings, on a given axle, is what helps
lateral stiffness in a bike frame. If an axle
is only a few millimeters long (like those
crammed in by the dropouts), then it offers
little resistance to lateral and torsional flex-
ing. That’s why the Sugar doesn’t use this
type of pivot at the dropouts.
Would you rather work on your bike than
ride it? Even the ultimate suspension design
makes for a lousy bike if it requires constant
service. That’s why the Sugar+ uses a totally
sealed, non-metallic pivot bearing. Think
about this; which wears faster, a suspension
fork (with non-metallic bushings) or a head-
set (with ball bearings)? If you answered
“headset”, you’re correct.
When you hit a bump with the rear wheel,
the force is transmitted through the pivot
(before it gets to the shock). With ball bear-
ings in a pivot, the contact area of the bear-
ings is extremely small, and metal to metal.
It’s inevitable that this contact point is going
to wear fast. With the Sugar, the contact
point is huge, and the bearings actually have
a small amount of shock absorption capacity.
This combination of features means you can
ride a Sugar for thousands and thousands of
miles without any maintenance, and without
any noise or rear end wag.
Industrial strength
The original development of the Sugar
pivot technology was for use in industrial
quarrying, where huge machines work under
monstrous loads in a dirty environment.
Gosh, almost sounds like mountain biking!
Bearing force threshold
If you take all the parts off a suspension
bike and remove the rear shock, you’ll find
several things. First, it becomes much easier
to see what the suspension does when the
rider hits a bump.
Second, you will see that there are dif-
ferences in the amount of force it takes to
initiate suspension movement. Brands with
ball bearings in their pivots point out that
the Sugar, especially when brand new, takes
some force to move. Generally, it take some-
where around 10 pounds of force at the rear
axle to move a brand-new Sugar swingarm.
Is this force threshold interfering with
the bike’s performance?. As you ride your
Sugar, the composite bearing deposits mate-
rial onto the nickel-less anodized pivot axle.
After break-in, the bearing surface becomes
in effect Teflon against Teflon. Since the
composite is much slipperier than the alumi-
num, the force required to activate the pivot
becomes much less after break-in.
The other thing to consider is this- once
you exceed the activation threshold, the ‘stic-
tion’ of the bearing no longer effects the trav-
el. You can feel this on the workstand. When
you sit on the bike, you have applied way
more force than ten pounds to the rear axle.
The spring stores the energy from you com-
pressing it, so when you get off, about the
same force works to return the shock to its
un-sagged length. So this ‘test’ of the bearing
stiction has little to do with how the bike
actually works.
Basically, we feel the huge bearing surface
of our design, coupled with its low weight
and totally sealed nature, make our pivot far
superior to a ball bearing pivot.
Frame features
At a quick glance, the Sugar+ may look the
same as our first Sugar, it actually has many
improvements.
New frame tubes = more lateral rigidity at
the same weight. The Sugar+ uses our new
frame material, ZR9000. The key to this new
material is that while the frame is now 15%
stronger, it is at the same time 15% lighter,
and way more fatigue resistant.