Progressive Suspension 430 Series Shocks - Feel the Difference

Performance Suspension for Your Performance Bike
In the mad rush for bloated horsepower, chromed nut covers and the latest in leather wrapped loveliness, it seems the importance of ride quality is often overlooked. Big power, speed, and stump-pulling torque are cool and all, but of very little use if your bike won't go around a corner or handle a few bumps in the road.

With that in mind, we took some time to visit the folks at Progressive Suspension to see how they deal with the ins and out of up and down. With just under 30 years of ride control under its belt, Progressive knows a thing or two about Touring bikes. We also brought along the cover bike from our June 2009 issue to act as our suspension guinea pig. It was immediately clear how serious these guys are as they quizzed us about rider weight, riding style and luggage capacity. Well, the Street Glide in question would be host to a 200 pound rider, ridden like a sport bike and would likely never carry more than an evenings worth of luggage. They seemed satisfied with our responses and recommended a pair of their 430 Series shocks and a fork lowering kit to help balance out the height added by a 21-inch front wheel on the Glide.

Since the Street Glide is already one inch lower than other baggers (12-inch shock length as compared to 13), we stuck with that height and based on rider weight stayed with the standard spring rate over the heavy-duty version Progressive offers. They also explained the 430 Series utilizes a state of the art high pressure gas mono tube design and deflective discs to handle the dampening duties as well as an easily adjustable preload cap. The fork kit they chose for us consisted of a progressive rate main spring and a handful of top out springs which provided the option of a one inch or two inch drop.

Install of this particular fork lowering kit required removal and disassembly of the legs but the Progressive guys now build another version (see sidebar) that does not involve disassembly of the legs. Fork preload is also tunable by adding or subtracting from the length of the spacer included in the kit. This machine would be ridden hard, so a little extra preload was added to keep it firm. Once the frontend was buttoned up, we moved on to the rear. All of the stock air lines as well as the shocks were binned and the 430s bolted up in under 15 minutes.

Spinning the top caps a few turns, Progressive set up preload (firmness) of the rear shocks to match the rider as well as showing us how to adjust it further if we decided to add a passenger or substantial amounts of luggage. The results were exactly as promised and the bike transformed from an ill handling monster to a touring bike that now rode as good as it looked.