Set rider sag on your own bike, in your own garage, at 11 p.m. the night before a trip. The base clips onto the rear axle by hand, and the backlit screen shows the reading while you sit in full gear. Pair the unit with the Slacker Virtual Remote app over Bluetooth LE, or leave the phone in the truck and read the display cold.
Flagstaff, Arizona, December 2012: a company started up to answer the question skeptical riders ask first. Why pay for a sag reading a tape measure gives away free? Because the tape hands back one figure when you crouch beside the fender and another when you stand over it, and the gap between them is the preload change you were trying to read. And because somebody has to stand there holding the bike upright by the bars for the whole reading, at 10 p.m., every time you touch preload. John Casebeer's answer clips to the axle, so you swing a leg over in full gear and read rider sag once, without setting a boot down. The Slacker puts rider sag on a backlit screen you can read while seated in full gear. Pull the kit out of the box the evening it lands and you read Slacker on the carton, Motool on the card under the foam. One names the tool, the other names the company behind it.
One detail the spec sheet buries: the kits differ in what reaches your handlebars, and the wireless remote does not ship with all of them. Scroll to the comparison below before you order: it shows which kit puts the reading on your bars and which leaves it on a phone in your pocket. Whichever kit you pick, the 1.06-pound tuner itself drops into the toolbox drawer your tape measure used to own.
The rules Motool held to between the first soldered garage prototype and the patented system you clip to an axle today.
Techs who revalve forks between motos for competitive teams set the bar, and they threw out anything they could not repeat on a Wednesday. A tech hands the bike back and answers for the number, so the target was a reading that survives a customer re-checking it in the parking lot ten minutes later.
The magnetic base holds the 6.5 x 3.5 x 7.5-inch unit on the axle by itself, so nothing in the mount or the display asks for a second pair of hands at 11 p.m. A rider alone in a garage at midnight is the design case, not the exception.
Clip the unit to a dirt bike on Saturday, a street bike on Sunday, and an adventure rig the week after, all off the same mount. You learn the routine once on the first bike and repeat it unchanged on the second, without relearning a scale in the dark.
Calibration lives in the unit itself: you zero it on the bike in front of you instead of trusting a factory number set months earlier. Owners who clip the base to an axle report it holding through a full bounce cycle without shifting, which is the test that matters at the trailhead.
Founding date, buyer rating, packed weight, and warranty term, each printed on the box or the listing.
Reading up before you buy? Compare the Slacker kits