fork bottoming details

some details, which parts of the fork are clashing and which parts should not...

some of you may have felt the energy when the forks were bottoming hard. look at the tiny aluminium tube of the cartridge, think it's not a good idea to use this to absorb all the energy.

of course the forks are designed to use the inner and outer fork tubes to withstand bottoming. it's the inner tube that hits the fork cap (which is screwed into the outer tube), see pic 1:

well, there is a bottoming cone you know. but there's some space left, it doesn't touch the cartridge. except it came loose, see pic 2:

in this case the bottoming cone is the bottoming element. means all the energy is transfered onto the cartridge. depending on the bottoming force, it may withstand or will be damaged.

look at pic 3, with a completely loose lock nut (=bottoming cone) there's a space between the inner fork tube and the fork cap when the fork is fully compressed.

sounds bad.

A steel spring seat the O.D of the inner tube would be a good idea there.