Can you Trust the Message? Yes, you can

The Trust Message suspension fork is easily one of the most polarizing components to come out in recent years. Trust is taking a swing at the traditionally telescopic suspension market. To fully appreciate what Trust is doing with its trailing-link suspension system, we must first dissect the root of what suspension is actually used for. Suspension is less about comfort and more about traction. Suspension as traction is a concept that doesn’t always translate well off paper. Though it is considered a subjective feeling it can be quantifiably measured.

It should come as no surprise that Trust chose to come out with a linkage design for their forks. After all, Dave Weagle, though not the pioneer of linkage, seems to have perfected it. With the DW-Link being one of the most widely recognized and used patents within the bicycle world, it has seen success time and again and continues to be the norm when it comes to anti-squat and being highly pedal-friendly. Weagle has a lifetime of design and thinking about suspension, including with motorcycles so it is safe to say that the design has to have some real merit to it. Is it enough to win over riders, especially with its hefty USD 1975.00 price?

The Message, from Trust Performance, squarely falls in the camp of traction over comfort. With a large, full-carbon form-factor, the Trust Message is not flexy, by any stretch of the imagination. It resembles in ride and aesthetics, a rigid fork, at least to an extent. It is here that the complete lack of flex that allows the fork to show what it is made of. After riding a Fox 36, 160mm boost spacing GRIP4 as my last fork, I wasn’t skeptical, but open and intrigued by how the message would ride. I was very pleasantly surprised with it as you will read.

Before ever getting on the trail, but after installing the fork, we need to talk about this setup. Given that the fork itself is essentially a pair of rear suspension units working in tandem within a rigid chassis it stands to reason that set up would be similar to setting up a pair of rear suspension units, in tandem. The manual they provide is wonderfully illustrated and straightforward, but If you don’t follow the manual exactly you will easily get lost.

On page 01 of the manual, it talks about air pressure. This has been the largest contested point of set up with the fork. Trust tells you to start with your body weight in pounds. Remember we are dealing with basically rear shocks here and the norm for an air rear shock is to start with your body weight. My 6’4”, 206 lb. frame is on the larger side of trail riders (though that was the norm when I was racing pro against Steve Peat and Nathan Rennie in the late ’90s), so I put in 200 PSI in each leg. This even number gives me an easy number to remember. Trust includes a shock pump that has an extra-long nozzle as the actual air valves are recessed within the legs on the sides of the fork. These valves are covered by rubber ports and an alloy valve cap that uses a 4mm hex indentation to assist removal.

Unless you have the fingers of a mouse, you are not going to be removing the valve covers otherwise. And to this end, I found the valve caps themselves to be a point of anxiety as they are hard to see (black within a dark void) and small enough to fall inside the fork legs. Thankfully I didn’t lose them, but I came close. I also had a small scare when my Allan wrench slipped a bit and rounded out the corners of the indent of the cap. Thankfully this didn’t destroy the cap, but I know now to be very careful and not use my Bondus head but rather a sharp, standard-head hex wrench. The manual from Trust does show them using a Bondus-head but I am sure my 12-year old Pedro’s wrench wasn’t the best choice, to begin with. In any case, be careful with these little air valve caps.

With air in place, you move on to damper controls with two pages explaining the sag meter. It shows you how to read it and use it to track your sag as you set the fork up and ride it. The real stuff starts to happen as you dive into the actual damper controls, also hidden by rubber port covers on the sides of the fork legs, with a rebound knob at the bottom of the drive-side leg. After inspecting each adjustment point and reading over the manual, I wanted to give it a try in a stock setting which ended up being 10-clicks of rebound out of 20 and 10 clicks of compression out of 20. Each click corresponds to approximately 10PSI. As stated, in the manual you, “Use your air pressure /body weight to your rebound and compression settings. Every click counterclockwise adjusts the rebound force to accommodate about a 10 PSI lower pressure. Fully closed = 300PSI. fully open = 100 PSI.”

The manual goes on to explain that you start by turning the open mode compression or rebound adjuster, (the lower of the two, 3-mm hex head adjusters) clockwise until it stops then back them out, counting each indent click. Just make sure not to turn the adjusters past the 20-click mark or could be damaged. Now with adjustment made, next is the “medium-mode” compression setting (the upper of the two hex head adjusters) where you turn the hex nut counterclockwise until it is a full stop (five clicks, again, move slow). The settings are rated corresponding to your body weight, with one zero clicks out = 300 lb. body weight, and each click beyond corresponding to a drop of body weight by 40 lbs. So that said, my 206-pound equaled two clicks out from fully closed (though technically this would be 220lbs of body weight, I felt it be better to error on the side of firm than the 180-pound setting of click number three). All pre-flight checks done; I was ready to ride.

On the trail, try to experience the Message as you have never ridden a telescopic fork. Forgetting all the muscle memory you have from decades of riding is hard. It will take your body and mind a few miles to get used to. The fork does not ride like a traditional fork, at all. Think rigid fork that actually will bend and flex over the terrain allowing the tire to track to every inch. It is a really strange sensation at first. The Trust Message (as well as their new model, the Shout) exhibit three different key characteristics that Trust has coined. Each of these is the Castor Effect, Ratio Effect and Trust Effect. Before you shout “marketing hype” hold off and let me explain each of these.

Every modern mountain bike uses a slack head angle and shorter fork offset to increase its mechanical trail (or caster measurement) as a way to improve high-speed handling. This is the Castor Effect. Longer front centers will increase stability at speed but the result of this is slower turning in tight, technical situations. Because of the design of the Message, the front of the bike will provide both attributes. The front-wheel will behave like a castor wheel on a cart, tracking the ground in any direction you point it while staying dynamically self-aligning. In short, the deeper you lean and the more you weight the front wheel, the more traction and larger the contact patch of the tire you lay into the ground. It sounds crazy, but it does work.

The linkage-controlled system creates the Ratio effect. A traditional fork is a 1:1 ratio of stroke to movement of the front wheel. The Trust Message, according to Dave Weagle is “pretty progressive compared to mountain bike rear suspensions, and the overall leverage ratio is 2.4:1 which is also comparatively lower than most mountain bike rear suspensions.” It is this leverage ratio that brings the advantages of a linkage-controlled rear suspension system to the front of the bike. This, in theory, provides for a more supple performance early in the stroke as well as allowing the front wheel to track the ground easier and providing more mid-stroke support and a predictable ramp-up/progression toward the end. Essentially a super predictable ride off the top with a very predictable progressive curve as you reach bottom-out.

The Trust effect is a little harder to fully digest and explain. It is one-part marketing and two-parts muscle memory/on the bike and riding. Trust tells us that the “Trust Effect is a sensation that makes you realize you can have more control, compliance, and confidence.” This is a very bold statement and one that is hard to quantify on paper. I feel I have been able to distill it down to this; you learn to trust the bike and your input to the bike as it becomes a true extension of your own body as you ride. Traction issues go away, speed comes more naturally as does control. But this all comes at a price as you need to fully open your mind to the differences and learn to relax your body into the bike. Trust that it has all of your best interests and will reward you.

 I have been riding on a Message for the last six months. I have previously been riding a Fox 36, 160mm boost spacing GRIP4, on a 150mm travel bike. Changing to a “downcountry” 115mm travel bike gave me the perfect opportunity to try Message on a frame that ideally should fit it perfectly. The frame I have it bolted up to is a small, custom one I have built up from a reputable carbon vendor (think of the Evil Bikes manufacturing plant), and decked with full Shimano XT 1x11 including Shimano XT wheels, Wilderness Trail Bike tubeless Verdict TCS Light 2.5 front /Judge 2.4 TCS Tough rear tires (28 psi in each), and a Race Face cockpit. It couldn’t get more enduro with less travel. Having a 65.5* head angle and 74.3* seat (with a One Up Components dropper post), I was ready to take on the hard-baked trails of Southern California.

 The very first thing that you notice about the Message is the feel at the bars and the view of the trail. The solid feel is very reminiscent of a rigid fork. Holding on to the bar and applying pressure to one side then the other in a twisting manner gives a feeling of holding onto the bars of a bike with a double-crown fork. There is zero flex in the system, and I can’t emphasize this enough. There was so little flex, I needed to keep my body looser than normal.

I found that the more aggressive you are with the fork, the more rewarded by speed and stability you are. The fork just makes its own traction in every situation I threw myself at. From big rocks to pea gravel and some sand pits, the front end stayed glued and predictable, as long as I remembered to stay fluid on the bike. Lean and steer with my hips, keep my head and shoulders level with the ground and the front end would just track like it was on a rail. I stopped a few times to play with the rebound to get it just right. It was feeling a little slow for my liking, so I adjusted the rebound to 16 clicks (always begin adjustments from the closed position/full counterclockwise) and it was spot on.

I did find myself wanting less air, in the fork. It was not bouncy at all and it stayed high in its useable travel, but when I dropped psi by 20 in each leg, I felt more planted and the fork opened up and wanted to play with me and the trail. When I was running a full 200 psi in each leg, I liked that I didn’t feel the buzz of the trail, however, I felt like I am going uncontrollably fast. I can’t fully attribute this to the fork working properly or if it was just bouncing off the rocks. Whatever was happening, when I dove into the steep shoot on Glendora Ridge descent at Upper Colby Canyon, I felt I was going too fast for my safety.

I rode it out, stopped to catch my breath and hiked back up to ride the section and the last 1/8 mile again. This time with less air in it to see if it would help. The feeling was for sure not that of a telescopic fork where the front of the bike would dive down, increasing the head angle and stink-bugging me over the bar and into a nasty head plant (speaking from experience on the same section of trail). My hunch was right, and the front of the bike felt even more controlled as I rode the off-camber singletrack into the rocky shoot. I wasn’t “out of control fast” but felt more able to pick the line I wanted, not where the bike wanted me to go.

Dave Weagle says you need to take every bit of knowledge you have about suspension forks and remove it completely from memory when working with a Message (or Shout). That will be hard for some as the muscle memory of most is deep-rooted in telescopic products, but I have to agree. The Trust Message feels nothing like a traditional telescopic fork, but I must say it rode much better. It simply was intuitive and became a real traction factory on every terrain and climbing. Oh, that was a joy! If you stay low, with a 70/30 weight distribution biased to the front wheel, the bike just motored up anything and the front wheel felt almost to be guiding the rear up the hills. 

The Trust Message is heavier than any other fork in its travel range, but it is lighter than a Fox 36, which somehow feels more fitting of a fork to compare it to. The weight, however, was not noticed at all in any environment and its DH-fork stiffness only amplified the tracking ability of the fork. I felt stable and controlled in every situation and when I would let go of my mind, ride the bike with my hips centered and shoulders slightly to the front of the bike to apply weight to the front wheel, I was rewarded every time. It kept me high in the travel while the wheel did all the work, allowing the bike to keep its actual head angle inciting confidence in me and making me feel as if I had more ability than I possess. Perhaps this is that Trust Effect that they talk about.

Now with its hefty price tag, it may not be for everyone, but it is on par with a new set of high-end carbon wheels. So, if you are planning on an upgrade for your bike, I very highly suggest seeking out a demo try a Message and reconsidering that wheelset. The fork will make you a better rider, or at the very least, make you feel like you are.