i found this article. i know it has something to do with the front forks and the suspension...but what is a cartridge and which bikes have them?

http://www.motorcyclecruiser.c...ators/

 

http://racetech.com/shopping/s...treet

 

so whats a cartridge. why cant you put one on a regular bike instead of just an emulator?

 

regular fork uses damping rod system to handle all speed damping, emulator allows one passage for high speed damping and another for low speed damping. Thus seperate spring rates may be applied to the two situations. I guess there might be 3 way emulators but I don't know. Regular rod only has one orifice so it would still be a single spring rate applied to both high and low speed damping provided it even lined up to work. More likely it would only apply to low speed damping and high speed damping would cause you to bottom out

 

so do full race bikes have "cartridges" that allow multiple damping or spring rates? and is the emulator a hack that kinda gets you similar performance to a true cartridge system on your regularly forked bikes?

 

yup, that's a fair generalization. You could also consider your current fork setup as a cartridge except that you cannot remove it as a whole and replace it with a differently spec'd unit. You must disassemble and replace individual parts such as springs. That is essentially the difference in the use of the term "cartridge". Emulator is kind of like the software that lets you play console games on PCs which I gather is why they use that term. I wouldn't think of it as a "hack" because it gives a good deal of the same performance, just based off of a conventional fork design.

 

so both a full on cartridge and a "cartridge emulator" have pretty much the same internal workings and do basically the same thing, without having to invest in a full on race setup?