THE BEST SUSPENSION CONTROL
AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
A Ramp Control cartridge is an air spring upgrade, available for most Rock Shox and Fox forks, that provides additional on-the-fly ride adjustability and improved performance, in a simple to use and easy to install package. Ramp Control technology is the BEST alternative to tuning your air spring with volume spacers.
from $139.99
MORE CONVENIENT
Tokens and volume spacers aren’t friendly to on-trail experimentation and tuning. Ramp Control provides precise control over air spring support via a 16-position knob with crisp, clear detents. In seconds, you can perfectly dial-in your fork for ANY trail , on-the-fly.
PERFECT PERFORMANCE
Progressive, volume-reduced air springs can worsen ride quality and buck you off line in slow, technical riding. A benefit of its speed-sensitive nature, Ramp Control gives you additional spring support only when you’d WANT it.
STRAIGHTFORWARD
Volume-tuning requires changes to air-pressure and damper settings, meaning one change necessitates several others. Ramp Control unlocks exacting control of spring support independent of these other settings.
BENEFITS:
SPRING CURVE
A BETTER WAY TO TUNE
Volume adjustment spacers change the shape of the air-spring’s curve throughout the entire travel range, regardless of velocity. Aside from the slight change resulting from the volume of the cartridge itself, the Ramp Control upgrade affects only the ending stroke spring curve — as its damping effect is velocity-dependent. This portion of the curve represents intense, sharp hits and big events, like landing a sizable drop or plowing through a rock garden. Without Ramp Control, your fork’s behavior in these circumstances has been compromised by your desired feel elsewhere in the stroke. With Ramp Control, you can tune the general feel of your fork through its air-pressure and damper settings, and isolate big-hit performance and bottom-out with the Ramp Control adjustment.
CONVENIENCE
CUSTOM TUNE ON THE TRAIL
Inarguably, convenience is one of the biggest benefits of the Ramp Control cartridge versus internally-accessed volume adjustment components. Internally-accessed spacers aren’t friendly to on-trail experimentation and tuning — requiring bulky tools and a clean environment to utilize. With Ramp Control, experimentation is so simple it’s encouraged! The powerful range of Ramp Control is harnessed through a simple 16-position knob with clearly defined detents. That enables you to arrive at your base setting in just one ride on a familiar trail, whereas internally-accessed spacers would necessitate a trial and error approach — several rides followed by garage or shop sessions — to get to the same point.
USEFULNESS
NO MORE COMPROMISES, TUNE TO THE TRAIL AT HAND
Unless you ride just one trail, the air-spring volume you’ve so carefully tuned with internally-accessed volume spacers is probably not ideal for all your adventures. A trip to the bike park might reveal, for example, that more support would be welcomed when the features and drops get bigger and trails get steeper than those found on your local go-to. If you have extra spacers and the necessary tools on hand, and don’t mind burning time that could otherwise be spent riding the lift-accessed terrain you just paid for, you could get the needed support. Or, in just seconds, you could add more Ramp Control and keep the good times going. Whether it’s a new-school flow trail or near vertical DH course, Ramp Control gives you immediate control of the terrain at hand — of particular benefit to time-crunched enduro fans tasked with practicing and racing multiple, varying stages.
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MRP Ramp Control cartridge review
New cartridge lets you adjust the air spring volume of your forks on the go
This competition is now closed
Published: April 30, 2017 at 6:00 am
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Our review
MRP has been using Ramp Control tech in its forks for a while to allow users to adjust the air spring volume, and therefore the progressivity of the stroke, on the fly. Now it’s available in a cartridge that fits inside any fixed travel, 35mm stanchion RockShox fork (Lyrik, Yari, Boxxer or Pike) and the Fox 32.
Rather than a solid piston, the system uses a variable-valve orifice to control air bleed speed into a secondary air chamber, depending on how far you twist the top-cap dial.
The cartridge takes up a similar space to one-and-a-half RockShox volume spacers, so if you’re running a single ‘Bottomless Token’ or none at all, give it a miss. If you’ve room, though, it provides subtle to very significant changes of shaft-speed-sensitive spring rate change, in the later-mid and final stroke, from the fork top.
I found it didn’t have any effect on slow/low-speed compression sensitivity, like using multiple solid tokens potentially can. This makes tuning far faster, more convenient and subtle than using a bag of volume spacers.
But at 10 times the price of enough tokens to tune most forks twice over, be sure to fully tighten the Ramp Control cartridge to avoid slow pressure leaks.
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MRP Ramp Control Cartridge — Review
The aftermarket fork hop-up business has essentially been non-existent since the days of bolt-on arches and Total Air cartridges, a fact that’s surely down to the majority of suspension brands not leaving much room for improvement these days. MRP, however, believe that isn’t the case, and they’ve come up with a clever looking system that replaces your fork’s air spring top cap and tokens with a cartridge that does the same thing while offering tool-free external ramp-up control.
Ramp Control Cartridge Details
• Speed-sensitive ending-stroke control / adjustable bottom-out
• External, tool-free adjustment via crown-mounted dial
• Replaces fork top cap and volume spacers
• Weight: 56 grams
• MSRP: $139.95 USD
The appropriately named Ramp Control Cartridge replaces your fork’s top cap and volume-adjustment tokens, and the 56-gram unit retails for $139.95 USD. MRP offers a bunch of versions to fit different models ranging from cross-country forks with 32mm stanchions to forks with 34 and 35mm upper tubes, and travel from 90mm to 180mm. MRP is also working on Ramp Control upgrades for downhill forks, which I can see being popular among racers. Check out the compatibility chart below to see which version works with what fork model.
The Ramp Control Cartridge weighs 56-grams, which is just 5-grams more than a Pike top cap and two Bottomless Tokens.
To best understand how the Ramp Control unit works, remember that air is a mixture of gasses that, while extremely thin, will still put up some resistance when forced through an extremely small hole or port at a high rate of speed. So while air does act differently than oil, you can think of it in kind of the same way in that oil is forced through ports and shims to provide damping. In fact, there have even been dampers that used air rather than oil, although that was many years ago now.
When we think of adjusting air volume to tune ramp-up, we’re probably picturing some sort of system where the physical volume of the air chamber is altered by turning a dial to move a piston up or down. And, with a sixteen-position dial on top of the cartridge, it looks like that’s the method MRP have gone with. but they haven’t. Instead, the anodized orange knob adjusts the preload on a small port at the bottom of the cartridge. More preload means that it requires more force for air to enter the cartridge, and you’ll therefore have more bottom-out resistance. Less preload allows air to transfer from the fork’s normal air chamber and into the cartridge easier, so you’ll have less ramp-up.
Why didn’t MRP go with some sort of volume-adjusting system as used on the piggybacks of some shocks? »One advantage is that the air spring curve is steepened only to the extent required when required,» says MRP’s Noah Sears. »That’s the result of the speed sensitivity. A pure volume adjustment doesn’t have that feature.» Controlling air transit during compression offers another plus, Sears explains, in that it’s more independent than altering air spring volume: »On-the-fly volume adjustment is less attractive than it sounds because a change in volume will change pressure and thus change your sag point.»
Getting the Ramp Control unit into your fork isn’t difficult, but you will need a few tools and some common sense. The first thing you’ll want to do is write down the air pressure that you’re using pre-Ramp Control Cartridge, just as a place to start from once it’s installed. Next, let all the air out of your fork so you don’t lose an eye when you remove the top cap (with a socket wrench, not an adjustable wrench as I used), and then back it out of the fork.
An 11mm aluminum nut hides access to the cassette tool interface under the orange dial.
You need an 11mm socket to back off the aluminum locknut that’s hidden under the cartridge’s air valve dust cap, and backing the nut off allows you to lift the orange dial up and off of the cartridge to expose the cassette tool interface. A cassette lockring tool is needed to thread the cartridge into the fork to the correct torque spec for whatever fork you have (I’m sure you’ll be using a torque wrench, right? Right.).
Next, drop the orange knob back down onto the cartridge and then thread the aluminum locknut back down over it by turning the 11mm socket with your fingers rather than the wrench. Being aluminum and that its only job is to hold the dial on, this nut calls for just 2Nm, which is next to nothing. If you use a wrench, you’ll likely damage the nut, never forgive yourself, and live in shame forever. If you didn’t bust the nut, you can now pump the fork back up and call it done.
The cartridge drops right into the fork. Total installation time: less than ten minutes.
I dropped the Ramp Control Cartridge into a RockShox Pike that, depending on where I was riding and my level of courage, had seen anywhere from one to four Bottomless Tokens installed inside of it. So I was familiar with how the fork felt with a single volume spacer, but also with how it ramped up when crammed nearly full, with me preferring the latter setup for the majority of my riding. It’s not that I’m constantly sending my bike and body off of large moves, but I do far prefer more progressive suspension that provides feedback and something to push against.
Instead, I turned the orange dial all the way in to see what maximum progression felt like. The result was me going from using full travel with a touch of hard bottoming on one particularly nasty landing to not quite using the fork’s full stroke when coming down off of the same drop. But, since this move is probably the hardest impact that I’m likely to see on my local mountain, I thought that I should be using all of the travel but that it should be more of a soft bottoming moment than a hard one. Backing the dial out a few turns did exactly that, all without having to use a socket wrench to add volume spacers.
Fill the fork’s air spring as per normal, and then adjust how it ramps up by turning the orange dial.
After a bunch of tinkering, I actually ended up running 5 psi less in the Pike and had the Ramp Control Cartridge’s dial all the way in, a setup that provided more sensitivity at one end of the stroke but just enough progression at the other. In other words, less compromise. MRP’s trick cartridge is still inside of my fork after months of use, and I still play with the dial from time to time to adjust the fork’s progression.
 | A big benefit of the MRP Ramp Control unit is that it removes the need for a socket wrench and can be used to alter how a fork feels in mere seconds, making it more likely that riders will adjust their suspension to better suit where and how they ride. But spending $139.95 USD on the upgrade will make zero sense if you’re not the kind of rider who thinks about such things. The set-and-forget crew simply won’t benefit from MRP’s drop-in cartridge, regardless of how effective and clever it is, but those who appreciate being able to tinker with the feel of their fork on the trail will see it as money well spent. — Mike Levy |
210 Comments
@turkeybaconsmellybitches: This course might be of interest to you. Seems like you have much to learn
@mikelevy Will you be also testing the Vorsprung Luftkappe?
Some comparison notes would be nice so we all can make a more educated decision on which of these two Upgrades may best suit an individuals needs. I currently run the Luftkappe but knowing the difference in what they both offer from each other makes answering questions from our customers at the bike shop a little easier.
Also, something like this for a boxxer WC would be pretty awesome for the weekend warrior/racer. Being able to finely tune a set up for a race when you don’t have a traveling mechanic is always a plus.
From the MRP website:
RS 35mm Ramp Control Cartridge Model A . will fit 2013-2016 Pike forks with 15×100 axle spacing and 2010 and newer Boxxer World Cup (air-sprung) forks. Solo air models only. Recommended for 140mm+ 29”,27.5+, 26” and 27.5” forks.
Just got a luftkappe over x-mas, looking forwards to sticking it in my lyric when the snow melts!
Sorry, no report for you on it yet, but it looks quality!
As for the MRP adjustable air spring, this comment isn’t for anyone.. just typing whats in my head; As a 5 tokens in my pike kinda guy, I really enjoy the mid support you get from how progressive the spring rate becomes. When you’re getting a bit wild in rough stuff I find these helps keep the bike’s front end up and out of big holes. After seeing the graph with the spring rates it looks like you lose (I guess its just even more progressive then «x» number of tokens) that.
@anthony3vans: The graph is a little misleading in that sense as it doesn’t highlight the requisite air pressure changes required to achieve the same sag in the different setups (various token counts vs. Ramp cartridge) — it’s a comparison of various setups at the same pressure. Look at the border between initial and mid travel in the graph — let’s call that 33% sag (high for a fork, but a suitable reference for this discussion). You can see that a «token-heavy» air-spring would require more force to sit at that travel, that’s why you’d need to drop your air pressure to get sag on par with a Ramp Control-enhanced fork.
Furthermore, by adjusting the dial on the Ramp Control cartridge you can manipulate the spring curves behavior beyond sag point. You don’t have that ability to decouple sag and spring curve with tokens.
We’ll work on a better graphical representation of what Ramp Control does.
@NoahColorado: Cheers for the explanation, I’ll admit that I only skim read the article and glossed over the fact that it doesn’t actually change the volume of the air spring. (I was under the initial impression that this was just a quick means of essentially changing tokens out on the fly.
I follow what you’re saying. As a 170lb-ish rider on a 150mm pike w/5tokens and about 85psi I sit around 15% sag. Not the most typical set up, but I still use the full travel of the fork often. I would say in response to @ThomDawson I’m likely confusing midstroke with simply how progressive the fork is.
@faul: yeah they were one of the companies I was referring to. Haven’t heard many reviews from riders actually using them so if you’ve had any experience I’m all ears!
i tested the luftkappe in my rockshox pike over the week end in finale ligiure. it is a great upgrade and in my opinion it has nothing to do with the mrp cartridge (equivalent to spacers). they change how the fork feels at the end of the stroke, whereas the luftkappe changes the whole feel to a much more linear feel, which i quite liked.
I had problems with having too run too much pressure to prevent the fork from blowing thru and i did not have the small bump sensivity i wished for.
Luftkappe fixed that, and my hands dont hurt anymore, i could blast madonna trails without stopping and my hands were fine, last year they would have fallen off. luftkappe requires you to run more pressure while at the same time being more sensitive at the very beginning of the stroke. so yeah I am quite happy now. (I run luftkappe with 0 tokens atm, before that I ran 2 tokens. Luftkappe takes the space of approx. 2 tokens)
@r0bb: Thank you for sharing your opinions. I myself was thinking about the Fast cartridge too but that is really expensive.
Yes AWK is a little complicated to handle, but it seems to be much easier to install personally. But as you mentioned Luftkappe is easier after, cheaper and also increases the neg. chamber.
I have 2 pikes on 2 bikes now so maybe I can get both and try We’ll see.
«Getting the Ramp Control unit into your fork isn’t difficult, but you will need a few tools and some common sense.»
If you’re relying on people to have common sense these days to install your product you’re customer service department is going to be mighty busy.
Why haven’t all fork manufacturers done this and use a cassette tool to remove topcaps. I vaguely remember some marz 66’s having the same feature and it made getting the top caps off a doddle without marking the delicate anodised aluminium finish on them or slipping like a ham-fisted monkey and scratching the crown.
I’ve been meaning to get a ground down socket sorted for years but have always forgotten until the moment I need to remove a top cap with a slightly ill-fitting rounded nose socket which never quite works 100%.
The concept looks great though, I can never be arsed to keep releasing pressure and changing the number of tokens in my Pikes and sometimes I forget to even put more air in before going for a ride where there’s bigger jumps and inevitably on the first slightly heavy landing finding the full travel point with a large clunk.
Bravo MRP, looks like a better executed solution than the bottom out adjuster on my Boxxers which is just a volume reducer as far as I can tell.
Some of these comments tell me just how out to sea some people are in their understanding of suspension function and setup.
Bravo MRP, Having to install tokens and volume spacers is just plain dumb! Why not put the control/adjust-ability there in the first place?
And why did this kind of thing come to the fore in the first place. I can think of a number of older designs that had end travel ramp control before (Marzocchi Rocco as an example). Why are so many newer offerings in need of tokens and spacers while having 5h1t mid-stroke support? Looking at you Cane Creek DB Air!
This Cartridge sounds very interesting for fast on-the-trail adjustments. Also the way it works — staying linear in slow compressions and giving more progressivity when the hit is faster.
BUT Ctrl + F «awk» — 0 results found.
Ok so I will be the one: pinkbike maybe take a look on it? For all those that dont know, its a secondary positive chamber, like the one found in the Öhlins fork reviewed some weeks ago. I think manitou also has an upgrade like this. I have been fiddling with tokens and pressures and compression settings and find the fork too soft between like 40 and 80% of the travel, e.g. when braking on steep terrain and then riding over a root. I like most the linear «no tokens» feeling to it, but then have to use about 120psi to keep it from bottoming out, resulting in a harsh ride.
From the physics behind 2 positive chambers the ability to tune the spring rate seems likely to solve all this — and still be able to tune the end progression
Cool! I’ve thinking of a similar concept for a long while, but that was with another floating piston in the air chamber (so you basically had two positive air chambers). Some damping on that piston would give you a similar effect, but it was much more complex. It requires a separate damping unit somewhere for that floating piston. This is much more clever and less complex. I’ve got two questions.
1. (And I might have missed this.). How about the rebound stroke, is there damping there as well or does the air flow back into the main air chamber without any delay? It wouldn’t be too bad having some delay there as well as that would give you an easier rebound stroke after hard hits.
2. Now that air in the air chamber is being used for damping, have you experienced any issues with the air warming up hence increasing air pressure? Or is this never an issue because of the size and surface for cooling (the stanchions, that is)?
«replaces your fork’s air spring top cap and tokens with a cartridge. Cartridge replaces your fork’s top cap and volume-adjustment tokens»
So, for those of us sitting at the back of the class, you remove the top cap and tokens from the fork, and then fit this cartridge. Correct? .
First ride today on my home track with the MRP ramp control. Very impressed with the noticeable performance gain.
My Set Up
Rider 180lbs.
2016 Yeti Asrc
2015 Pike RC 130 MM travel (I have run it at 140MM) +4 Tokens
29″ Wheels = Nox Carbon 23 psi
67.5 PSI (70 psi from the Fox pump)
5 Clicks Compression
7 Clicks Rebound (ended up with 10 Clicks)
Cat 1 Rider
Area of the country: Western NC, Upstate SC — Brevard, Pisgah, DuPont, Paris Mountain — Technical rock, root strewn trails.
Here are some of my observations from it. With the same air pressure (67.5 psi) on a Pike 130 I am at 30 MM of sag. With the same air pressure and 4 Tokens I was 18MM and with 3 tokens I was at 25MM of sag.
I ran the fork with all the progression out at first to see what that did to the fork. At first the fork in technical sections was a little slow and lazy. So rather than add progression I sped up the rebound.
I like the climbing in this set up since the fork is little more in the mid stroke and seems to track better I think since there is less ramp up from the additional volume.
The biggest difference was downhills. Anything high speed and the fork tracked noticeable better. Now what do I mean by better. The fork didn’t deflect off line, in high speed, high lean corners where your trying to really max speed and have to make a tight radius.
Wash boards, chatter bumps, roots, rock gardens, baby heads were all tamer and noticeable the fork tracks smoother without any noticeable bottoming out.
Quite frankly the fork became more supple, compliant and predictable. IMO with 2 Tokens and especially 4 tokens the fork wanted to really fight that last 1/3 of travel as the volume became tighter.
I ran the fork with +4 progressions (1 full turn) and +8 progressions (2 full turns) and noticed the fork for my riding started to drift off line more and exhibit similar tracking that 4 tokens had. I ran the same trail each time. For me the lower progression really add stability at high speed in very tight switch back/technical downhills.
I think for experienced riders you’ll suddenly notice that you no longer have to ride in expectation of the rebound/deflection from hitting something on the trail where you manipulate your lines because the suspension/reaction has to be compensated for.
For me it was laying down fast tight lines in trees and ending up smoothly where I really wanted to be not off line by some factor.
I think you can dial in that mid travel since you’re not having to compensate for bottoming out.
For me dialing in the mid stroke/travel will start with speeding up the rebound rather than adding progression as I feel that will help in technical sections.
I have a Luftkappe to add to the mix and I will report back with that and long term.
As a side note I ran +2 progression on the Local Enduro race course and never got the fork to bottom out. The only way I could bottom out was to launch the bike and coming down flat — intentionally.
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