Suspension service intervals are in hours, not kilometres

FOX gives 125 hours for a full fork service in current owner's manuals. RockShox is a two-part interval: 50 hours for the lower legs plus 100 to 200 hours for the damper, depending on the generation of the fork.

FOX's Transfer dropper post is two different jobs at two different intervals: 25 hours for a grease service and 300 for a full rebuild. Chris King and DT Swiss hub intervals are calendar-based with a much shorter figure in wet conditions. Zipp quotes 100 hours in support material.

Not one of those is a distance.

A 30 km enduro day is four hours on the fork. A 100 km road ride on the same clock is three. Any conversion between the two has to assume an average speed, and that assumption is where the error lives – it is the difference between servicing on schedule and servicing at double the interval.

The riders for whom this matters most are exactly the ones whose average speed is lowest and most variable: mountain bikers, bikepark days, technical trail riding.

Neither FOX nor SRAM documents whether 'riding hours' means moving time or elapsed time. Kuralta uses moving time, because elapsed massively over-counts café stops, lift queues and shuttle rides, and over-counting means paying for a service the fork has not earned.

That is a product decision, stated openly rather than hidden. It is also the conservative one in the direction that costs money rather than the one that costs a fork.

A trainer session wears the chain and the cassette. It does not move the fork, scrub a tyre or heat a rotor. A tracker that counts one clock for everything will mark a fork overdue after a winter of turbo sessions it never experienced.

The 30-to-50-hour lower-leg figure widely attributed to FOX exists in current manuals only inside an image – a JPEG named for a much older model year – rather than as text. It is reproduced in the Kuralta reference as read, and labelled as a secondary source, because that is what it is.

The widely repeated 'RockShox 200 hour full service' also quietly omits the mandatory 50-hour lower-leg item that sits under it.