My nerd eye has turned upon suspension forks lately, mostly with a focus on mountain bikes. What I've learned does not square with the Bike Forums conventional wisdom, which seems to have been inherited frozen in amber from Usenet in the mid-90's and has a contrarian bent. Only some of it squares with experience, design, or features of actual forks for sale on bikes right now, so I thought I'd lay out some thoughts on the topic. I've got an outline in mind. The next post will be about the benefits and disadvantages of a suspension fork, in general. The second will run through some details of what a fork does. The third will be about inexpensive Suntour forks (XCT, NCX, and so on). The fourth will be about the less-expensive Rockshox forks (35, Recon, Judy, et al). Then I'll circle back for discussion. They're not all coming in a sudden heap, so stay tuned. At least it will give us something to do in the commuting forum while we wait out the crisis.