BMW S1000R 2014 DDC re-spring for heavy rider 

Thank for the kind words. I have simply had a 25mm "spacer" machined in stainless steel that fits the mirrors (diameter 28mm) and installed longer bolts and the stock weights. Each spacer adds about 100grams of weight to the 300gram stock weight. That combined with the weight of the mirrors themselves has more or less completely eliminated the vibrations stock bikes have.

Sasa Milosavljevic sorry for my late reply, I’ve been on holiday. I’m much happier than with the stock suspension for sure, still tinkering with the adjustments to fine tune it. Sadly due to work I have not been able to ride more than 2000km so far this year. But I still consider it to be money well spent.

Hi. Yeah, us heavier people quickly start to struggle with the suspension on these bikes. I did re-spring the forks, and I had wilbers rebuild my rear shock. if you check my channel there are a few more suspension videos with all the things I done.

The thing is that once you bottom out, the tire has to take up the remaining damping force. The problem is greater for the front than the rear. Imagine breaking into a corner, the fork is fully compressed, then you hit a bump, there is nothing to take up that bump. Going straight you will just hear a "pinging noise" from the fork and feel the bump in your arms as the forks go completely stiff. If you are in the middle of the corner with the bike leaned over, there is a good chance the front wheel will skip when the fork goes stiff, possibly leading to you loosing the front end grip and crash. The rear is less critical, but obviously the metal parts inside the shock hitting each other is not good. Most bikes suspension is designed for a 75kg rider plus 10kg of gear. If you are 100kg plus gear, you are 25kg heavier than the designed weight. It is therefore recommended to change the spring if you are a heavier rider, even on cheaper bikes with no adjustment to the suspension. For normal road riding, you will probably not bottom out even at 100kg, it's when you are riding hard this happens. I guess to give you a quick answer, regardless of your weight, you probably won't need to do anything on a bike that is not ridden hard. But if you do see that you bottom out from time to time, be aware that it could cause you to crash, the shock can get damaged and you will build up metal shaving quicker in the shock oil making them require service sooner. Another thing when modifying your suspension, start with the rear shock first, getting the rear set up correctly will usually improve how the forks work. I managed to get 5-6mm less compression of the front fork on my current bike, just by slowing down the rebound on the rear, slowing down the weight transfer to the front during braking.

@@850bimmer appreciate your response (greatly detailed and speedy response) Cheaper to loose weight loool

@@850bimmer sorry I had a sleep and came up with an additional question.. Why do they set the springs for 1x 85kg rider, however they sell every bike with pillion pegs and seat. This doesn't seem to make sense. As adding an additional person or luggage will exceed the suspension weight that they set the bike at. So technically the bike isn't suited to take pillions or luggage. Unless the assumption is that the avg person weights 40kgs so going 2 up brings weight to thier limit of 80kg. Or am I missing something.

@@512460 No you are right. They use the universal 75kg rider plus 10kg in gear during the design. If you look in the manual, it will typically list a setting for single rider, and a different one for with luggage or passenger. This will improve things, but its a compromise, as you are not expected to ride like this all the time. The handling will not be great but better than if left unchanged. The Electronic suspensions usually have a "two-up" setting, BMW have a "two helmet" setting and it sometimes will ask you to put the spring preload closer to max. Cheap bikes will typically only have a preload adjustment that you are supposed to crank up in those cases. My current bike has one default setting and one for luggage/passenger, that indicates preload and compression/rebound damping for the two conditions. The way I got around it on my current bike is that I have it set closer to the luggage/passenger settings to compensate for my extra weight, its not ideal, but it works for sporty street riding.

@@850bimmer appreciate the response yea also I guess with the bmw you can use to two up feature as a single rider to squeeze that little bit out. Haha Obviously again not really ideal but more like a band-aid lol