Offsets combined with head angle, fork height and wheelsize is an interesting one!
I agree with you on the lower offset forks Walt. It is common in the WC DH racing world to use fork offset and head angle to balance the grip with the rear end and or create more grip on the front tire in corners. In my experience, there is a middle ground which has neither a pushing nor tucking feel in corners.
I’ve tried many combinations on a Fox 40, 36 and Ohlins DH38. My impressions are when the offset is too low and there are some g-outs mid corner then the tire bites and tucks in a bit too much creating a high side situation. With an offset too low, I had to run the fork harder then I would like to combat this. With too much offset the tire pushes wide in corners. Also, with too much offset the front tire doesn’t climb out of a rut or off camber very well. The tire sort of slides back into the rut and gets pushed around by the terrain. It is also harder to recover when the front wheel starts to slide. Here you can see my front tire sliding but controllable. This is with 29” wheel, 44mm offset Fox 38, 180mm on a 64* head angle.
On a DH fork with 63* head angle I think 48-52mm feels pretty good.
Double crown forks are a lot easier to test and play around with. At one point I had 4 different Fox 40 crowns and 5 Ohlins DH38 crowns. I had one angled 40 crown which was interesting but a pain to use in practice since you had to be so precise with head tube length for them to line up. I’ll dig out some pics of that stuff.
Here’s a pic with 3 different offset crowns on a Fox 36. I settled on 44mm offset with 170mm of travel on a 64* head angle.
