hagon springs too soft?

[mikeb]

a couple of years back i put some hagon 33007SS shocks on the super rocket - same length (330mm centres) and a big improvement to have some damping but I noticeably lost some ground clearance. lots more scraping.
looking at that today (some things take a while) the hagon springs are short, soft and variable rate. on the 'soft' setting they measure approx 200mm and i can start to compress them by hand. whereas the old BSA (? maybe originals) measure at 225mm on 'soft' and are very stiff.
weird as the supposed standard spring for these hagons is a 'HGS3  20kg Heavyweight' spring.

anyone else had this?
did i buy/receive the wrong springs?
I might just swap the old springs to the hagon shocks even tho they are longer and will need some compressing- any gotchas?

cheers

[Butch (cb)]

Hagon will supply springs to your specification – if you request that. On my Sporty I did not and converse to your experience they are way too hard (like riding a hard tail but without the cool look).
I also have their shox fitted on my H1 Kawa which are spot on, and just recently fitted a set to my SP370 off roader which also work well (just one trip out on them so far).

They will supply you with different springs as you wish – but that will cost now of course.

[edboy]

i find the hagons too soft but only on the sporty a10 version of my bikes. i also believe 330mm may be too short and will eventual buy the a65 longer shock and keep on a soft setting.

[mikeb]

A bit of an update on this for anyone else sorting hagon springs.

The hagon springs have a rating stamped on the top of the coil – tho you have to remove the retainer to see it – I could do this by hand on the softest preload (likely possible while on the bike). I do have the standard 20kg/cm rate springs. They have a variable coil so I assume they are progressive tho when measuring their compression (with upto 50kg force) the spring rate was closer to 22kg/cm on the initial part of the spring and I couldn’t manage enough measurable force to measure at the progressive part of the curve. The spring was 210mm free length and the shock mounting centres are 330mm.

I read on this site that standard A10 string rate is 110 lb/in which equates to 19.6kg/cm and the soft spring is 90lb/in (16kg/cm). I thought about swapping in the old (maybe original) linear BSA/girling? springs but they measured (under weights) as near 16kg/cm (=soft) and the free length was 247mm. Also the total shock length was 8mm longer than the hagons.

So swapping the old springs into the hagons would provide a lot of preload (38mm worth) tho the sag on the bike (with the hagons on max preload of 17mm) was only about 10% (bike and rider) so I’d just end up with maybe a bit less sag then softer springs. the standard theory would be the sag is too little already.

So I put the hagons back on, unchanged. The next higher spring rate in the hagons shop is 24kg tho with those numbers I probably don’t need them. Another day well spent measuring and mucking around on a BSA. Nothing changed.