Fox 36 & 36 SL
Travel Options: 140, 150, and 160 mm
Wheel Size Options: 27.5’’ and 29’’
Available Offsets:
- 27.5’’ forks: 37 and 44 mm
- 29’’ forks: 44 mm
Stanchion Diameter: 36 mm
Spring: Air
Stated Weight: 1,920 g (29’’ | 160 mm travel | Grip X damper)
Blister’s Measured Weight: 2,134 g (29” |160 mm travel | Grip X2 damper)
[Note: the Grip X2 damper is about 120 g heavier than the Grip X one]
MSRP: $749 to $1,199 USD
Travel Options: 120, 130, and 140 mm
Wheel Size: 29’’
Offset: 44 mm
Stanchion Diameter: 36 mm
Spring: Air
Stated Weight: 1,755 g (140mm travel | Grip X damper)
Blister’s Measured Weight: 1,789 g (140 mm travel | Grip X damper)
MSRP: $699 to $1,149 USD
Intro
Fox just launched the new 34 SL XC race fork, but they’re not done reworking their lineup. There’s now a new 36 SL — which replaces the 34 as their lighter-duty Trail bike fork — as well as an updated version of the longstanding 36. Let’s see what they’ve cooked up.
Design & Features
The 36 and 36 SL share many design details, so we’ll start with the areas where they overlap. Both (unsurprisingly, given Fox’s longstanding naming conventions) have 36 mm stanchions and they look very similar, but the 36 SL is substantially lighter and is offered in shorter-travel configurations, while the beefed-up 36 handles the longer travel end of the Trail bike spectrum.
Both versions get new lowers with similar design language to the new 34 SL that Fox launched shortly before the 36 siblings. The arch on both forks features a series of cutouts to remove material where it’s not needed, and the bypass channels in the lower legs (which allow air and oil to move past the lower bushings more easily, mitigating built-up air pressure in the lower, and providing better lubrication to the upper bushings and seals) have been moved to the insides of the legs. Unlike the 34 SL, which forgoes them in the name of weight savings, both 36 variants feature push-button pressure relief valves on the lowers, as Fox has been offering on their longer-travel forks for some time now.
Both forks are air-sprung only, but Fox has made some updates to the design of the spring. It’s still a single-positive air chamber design with a self-equalizing negative spring — as Fox (and RockShox) have been using for over a decade — but Fox has taken an interesting approach to reducing friction in the system.
Unlike most air-sprung forks, the air spring piston in both the 36 and 36 SL isn’t mounted rigidly to the air shaft. Instead, it floats slightly on two very thick O-rings to allow a bit of misalignment of the air spring shaft and the stanchion without introducing nearly as much friction in doing so. There’s a similar arrangement in the negative spring plate at the bottom of the stanchion to allow slight misalignment there as well.
The thinking here is to help reduce friction and binding when the fork is subjected to heavy bending loads. It’s (comparatively, anyway) easy to achieve reasonably precise alignment of the spring shaft and stanchion when the fork is static, but that all goes out the window once the fork is flexing fore-aft. The new spring design should move more freely under those circumstances. Another nice touch is that the air spring top cap on both forks now uses a standard cassette tool instead of a large hex wrench to make volume spacer swaps slightly easier, with less likelihood of marring or stripping the top cap.
Things carry over unchanged on the damper side, with the Grip damper that’s been around for a while staying put in the most affordable Performance version of both forks. The newer Grip X and/or Grip X2 dampers are featured in the higher-end variants, depending on the exact specification in question — more on that below.
36 SL
As mentioned above, the new 36 SL replaces the 34 as Fox’s lighter-duty Trail bike fork. In keeping with that, it’s offered in 120, 130, and 140mm-travel versions, and it’s only designed for 29’’ wheels.
At a stated weight of 1,755 grams, the 36 SL is about 100 grams heavier than the 34 that it replaces, but Fox says that it’s also 20% stiffer torsionally. The 36 SL gets 20 mm more bushing overlap than the 34 had, which should help with fore-aft stiffness as well, though Fox doesn’t cite a specific figure there.
36
The standard 36 shares most of its features with the 36 SL, just in a beefed-up, longer-travel package. It’s offered in both 27.5’’ and 29’’-wheeled versions, with 140, 150, or 160 mm of travel, and at a stated weight of 1,920 g (29’’, 160 mm travel, Grip X damper), it’s about 165 grams heavier than the 36 SL. That’s negligibly lighter than the outgoing 36, but Fox claims that the new version is 20% stiffer torsionally due to the revised chassis and increased bushing overlap; they also claim that the new 36 is 87% as stiff torsionally as the 38 Enduro fork.
The Performance Elite and Factory versions of the 36 are offered with either the Grip X or Grip X2 dampers that Fox debuted in 2024; the latter gets more sophisticated valving and an additional high-speed compression adjuster but forgoes the climb mode of the Grip X and adds about 120 grams.
The new 36 lowers take a 200 mm rotor directly, and Fox clears the 36 to run up to a 230 mm one with an adapter.
Some Questions / Things We’re Curious About
(1) How different do the 36 and 36 SL chassis feel — both compared to each other and relative to the 34 and prior-generation 36 that they replace, respectively? Fox is touting substantial increases in stiffness, but how noticeable are those changes?
(2) Does the revised air spring deliver noticeable performance gains when the fork is flexing fore-aft? And how does it compare to the outgoing version in general?
Bottom Line (For Now)
Between the new 34 SL that just launched and now the new 36 and 36 SL, Fox has given their fork lineup a substantial overhaul. While the updated designs aren’t radically different from the forks that they replace at a high level, the revised air spring, supposedly increased chassis stiffness, and other added features (e.g., bolt-on fender compatibility on the 36 SL as compared to the outgoing 34) all sound like promising updates.
We have both the new 36 and 36 SL in for review now. We’ll have Flash Reviews published shortly and Full Reviews to come down the line.
They are calling the new 36 stiffer and more like the 38, but it’s not offered in 170 mm versions. Strange. For years, 170 was a common size for the Lyrik/36.
I would have thought that since they claim this one is 20% stiffer, a 170mm version would make sense for lighter and less agessive riders, especially people who just want a bit longer fork for geometry reasons, and because with modern, slack head angles, a 1700 mm fork only gives you about 150mm of vertical travel, yet most people wouldn’t want a 38 on their 150mm travel bike.