Suspension Fork Springs

I started gathering this info as part of a bigger project, but I think it has some value on it's own, so here it is.
The following spreadsheed (because I love spreadsheets... no not really, just an easy way to do some math with common software) lists several coil forks, the "firm" or 'firmest' springs for those forks (in lb/in), the force at full compression, and some other stuff, discussed below.


Now if you scroll over, you'll see the stanchion diameter, wall thickness (which was mostly a guess, see the next paragraph), which gives me ID, which in turn gives me cross sectional area. And finally, the pressure on that area from the above max spring force.

For the wall thickness, I measured the ID of a RockShox Totem and assumed the thickness was the same for all other forks. Obviously not the most accurate, but not a ridiculous guess either. No RockShox forks appear in this list because they don't list the spring rates for their forks, at least not anywhere I could find. Also worth noting that the Marzocchi fork listed uses an air assist rather than different springs, for rate tuning, which is why it's rate is so much lower than the others.

The idea here was to figure out, for an air spring, the maximum pressure ever encountered by the fork. This tells us, or at least suggests, the pressures the seals will have to resist, and possibly some other stuff related to design of suspension.