Manitou Minute Suspension Fork – Broken Rebound Knob!

It’s slightly less an informational post today and more an opportunity for me to vent my spleen about some pretty shoddy components in my supposed high-end fork!

I got a Manitou Minute One fork as standard on my Specialized Epic and, to be fair, it’s performed pretty admirably up until now. It’s nice and responsive, and soaks up the trail like nobody’s business. Out at Glentress the other day though I tried to have a little play with the rebound just to see if I could tighten it up a little for the last couple of sections. This basically involves turning the blue, metal knob on the bottom of the right stanchion to dial the rebound up or down – a pretty simple mechanism you might think.

Well, imagine my obscenity-laced consternation when the knob suddenly came loose in my hand and dropped out of the stanchion, leaving my bike on a now-permanent deity level of rebound. Seriously, I could place a small dog on my handlebars, compress the suspension and catapult the little woofer back home to Edinburgh. Further inspection of the offending blue knob revealed that the metal head section was screwed to a skinny little shaft of plastic which led up into the stanchion and turned the internals. I should say used to lead up the stanchion because now the aforementioned supermodel-thin plastic shaft was sheared in two and about as much use as a coal powered frog-violin.

I’ve since read up about this and learned that it’s happened to just about every Minute One at some point in it’s life. Why would Manitou do this on an otherwise high-spec piece of kit, saving as much as 2p on every unit by using plastic parts rather than metal?

I don’t know, obviously it’s not a problem unique to them, but pointless corner-cutting like that drives me crazy. And for the sake of a 2p piece of plastic, apparently I have to send my fork off to Manitou for a, most-likely, £100+ service. I don’t beleive them though, I bet there’s a shop close-by that’ll be able to bodge it. I just need some other way to turn the internals after all….

I’ll let you know how it goes!