Are RT Pro Springs “True Dual Rates”?

Absolutely. There seems to be a group of people drinking some bad Kool-Aid lately. Some of our competitors don’t exactly explain all the facts. Something to consider is this information is all coming from someone who clearly has a bit invested in producing and selling these “required” crossover rings… One competitor even has a “patent pending”.

Coming from a suspension engineers perspective, this whole debate is kind of silly.. Even the detractors actually explain the truth while they try to take away from the design… How can you have two different spring rates and NOT have dual rates? The exact intent of the design is to fully compress the short spring. This does the exact same thing as the crossover rings do. Our design is what we’ve coined as a “top heavy” dual rate and the large majority of all racers on the east coast are using this same concept now. Even the aftermarket companies are starting to embrace it. Crossover rings are nice for fine tuning and we’ve said it before, WE USE cross over rings on our race cars and when we’re testing new kits! We have nothing against them. However, once we figure out where the “shift point” should be for a production kit, we start to design a custom spring to bottom out at the same time. This does two things; 1. Eliminates the need for crossover rings and the extra cost. 2. Produces a much smoother transition. The result is a less expensive kit with less messing around for the end user and a smoother ride with better handling and less requirement for internal rework (when done properly). We learned this out of necessity way back in 2007 when we first started playing with spring kits for our RZ3 mid travel kit for the RZR 800. There were no threaded bodies on the OEM shocks to utilize a crossover ring but the suspension geometry was asking for more than a linear rate design. So we HAD to come up with something outside the box. Once we figured it out, it turned out to have a lot of other applications and here we are today.

By fully compressing the short spring you gain a few advantages. 1. You get more travel out of your spring stack. 2. The formula to get proper shift points and initial rates results in a less drastic transition from combined rate to final rate. 3. The transition is much smoother due to the use of the full cycle of the tender spring. It acts much more “progressive” which most recreational drivers appreciate.

Through the years we’ve learned a TON about this design and how it functions and works best on a case by case basis. We’ve found some cars like to shift pretty far in to the stroke and some like it right away. It all depends on the car and the application. We’ve done our best to narrow options down and offer kits to fit the masses. We don’t release our short springs rates because we’ve got a lot of work in to them. We know it’s not impossible to figure it out though. Ironically, most of the info we’ve seen posted is wrong. Our detractors might say our short springs are improperly designed but they obviously don’t know what we know so don’t bother taking this stuff too seriously. If you like our springs, and lots of people do, then there’s not much left to think about! That’s one of the best things about the RT spring kits; They are designed to throw on and go. Most people never need anything else.