Two pairs of neodymium magnets, each rated to hold 500 kilograms, face each other across the frame of a bicycle. No springs. No oil. No air. That's the whole suspension system Colin Furze just built — and it works, right up until the bike hits a real bump and turns into a pogo stick that won't stop bouncing.
A spring that never gets tired
Push two magnets together with the same poles facing and they push back. That's the entire trick behind the bike: one magnet array on the frame, another on the fork and swingarm, all oriented to repel. Compress the "suspension" by hitting a bump, and the magnetic field pushes the wheel back down just like a coil spring would. No moving fluid, no seals to leak, no oil to change.
For small, gentle bumps, this works beautifully. The magnets store the energy of the bump and hand it straight back, exactly the way a spring is supposed to.
The half of suspension that magnets can't do
Here's the problem: a spring is only half a suspension system. Every real fork or shock has two components — a spring that absorbs the bump, and a damper that bleeds off the energy afterward as heat. Springs alone don't stop oscillating; they just keep converting kinetic energy back into potential energy and back again until something else, friction or air resistance, finally kills the motion.
A hydraulic damper does that job by forcing oil through a small orifice, turning the bump's energy into heat and getting rid of it. A magnetic field can't do that. There's no orifice, no friction, no way for the field itself to dissipate energy. Whatever energy goes into compressing the magnets comes right back out, at close to full strength.
Here's the 60-second version of what that looks like on the road.
Why it turns into a pogo stick
Without a damper, any bump big enough to meaningfully compress the magnets doesn't just get absorbed, it gets returned, and the return overshoots, and that overshoot gets returned again. The bike keeps bouncing until ordinary friction in the frame, bearings, and tires slowly bleeds the energy away, which takes a lot longer than a damper would. Small road texture feels smooth. A pothole turns the whole bike into a pogo stick.
This is close to what killed magnetic and air-only suspension concepts in the automotive world decades ago: a spring without damping isn't a suspension, it's an oscillator.
The failure mode nobody wants
There's a sharper problem hiding underneath the physics one. The whole system depends on the magnets never actually touching. If the suspension ever bottoms out hard enough for the repelling faces to get past each other, two magnets rated to hold 500 kilograms apiece will snap together at speed, with the rider's leg sitting somewhere in between. A spring that fails just goes soft. A magnet array that fails inverts from repulsion to violent attraction.
What an actual fix would need
None of this is unfixable, it's just missing a part. Add a hydraulic or friction damper alongside the magnets and you'd get a genuinely novel spring-by-magnetism suspension with normal ride characteristics. Rare-earth magnet springs have been explored seriously for years, mostly in vibration isolation for industrial machinery, always paired with some separate damping mechanism. Furze's build is a fun demonstration of the spring half of that idea in isolation, which is exactly why it bounces the way it does.
The interesting part was never really the magnets. It's the reminder that "suspension" is two different jobs bolted together, and building a viral demo of just one of them is a great way to find out, in public, why the other one exists.
