This shows the shim stacks from the stock setup and the Gold Valve. When I took this photo I was doing one side at a time and since you have to reuse the spacer from the stock setup there isn't one shown in the Gold Valve lineup. But when the stack is built you put the stock spacer in the stack where I left a little space right next to the gold spacer. As you can see the stock setup starts out on the left with 3 stiff shims, then a small shim and then a somewhat linear tapering down. The Gold Valve has just a linear taper. Once I had this laid this out and saw what the stock stack was doing a handling anomaly was explained. As you can see what they seem to have been trying to do, was have a bit of give at the top of the damping curve by putting the small shim in at the #4 spot, then they assumed that once past that you would want a nice linear damping. They were trying to have their cake and eat it too by having a "soft" ride and *then* a stiffer damping curve. What I found was that that worked somewhat if you were going straight down a smooth road but that once you started riding for fun on a curvy road the damn bike would "hobby-horse" around as it rocked back and forth over that hinge point in the damping. The Gold Valve doesn't have this hinge point and I noticed that I liked the handling better right off the bat.