Mace,
Very well done.. Your clarity is awesome..
To elaborate further.. The shim stack is used to create the damping. (DUH) This shim stack and piston relationship is critical. The port of the piston determines what the effective area of the opening is as a function of deflection. Larger areas do flow more oil (at specific speeds) however they tend to flow too little at very low speeds, too much at mid speeds.
The valve and shim relationship is simmilar to a concept in CALC where you need to find the area inside of a iregular shaped object. You can make a few small rectangles and aproximate it's area. On the average this is halfway corect.. This would be simmilar to a "damping coefficent" listed in a manual. This damping coifecent is the same for a awesome shock and a very poor working shock on the average.
Continueing with our allogy what if we could divide that wavy surface into smaller "chuncks" This would give use a more acurate test of area. Now we are talking about a shim stack and piston that is still the same "average coeficent" however it has more variations to speed and restaiance.
Using calculus we couldfind the exact area of the object, in suspension I still can't find the ideal damping, but with contunied fine tunning we have tried to idealize both the realtionship of the shim stack and piston design to optimize the deflection characteristic and the piston design as the two, thow not biological have a "symobitic" existance (For lack of better word.)
Another critical point. Many times in exsplantions to customers they look at my stack and go man that shim stack is so soft.. Or the stock stack is so stiff that is why my suspension stinks.. The problem with this is that the valve is again not understood in relationship to its stack. A higher flowing valve also produces less deflection which actualy strains the shims less and produces a softer feel.
A low flow pistonmight use 50% less shims yet strains them 3 times as much and actually at some speed range produce a stiffer coefficent.
Regards,
Jer