PROGRESS REPORTS

Fork Repair

First, remove the fork tubes from the lower triple tree bracket. The upper brkt. bolts are just loosely screwed into the tube plug just because I always try to make it a habit of reinstalling any screws, nuts, bolts and other fasteners back into their respective location after disassembling something so that I don't have to sort thru a coffee can full of fasteners trying to remember what went where when it comes time to reassemble everything.

Remove the spring clip and felt seal from the top of the slider.

Remove the retaining nut from the bottom of the damper assy. (it's accessible from the bottom of the slider) and pull the tube out of the slider. Normally, you would want to drain the oil out of the fork before removing the tube, but a previous owner had decided to run the forks without oil.

Next, unscrew the slider tube plug from the top of the tube and remove the spring from inside the tube.

Now here is an innovative approach to solving a problem. The spring in one leg was broken - rather than replace it though, someone just put a longer spacer in the tube!! As you can see, since the spring no longer had a closed end it put a lot of stress on the top coil and subsequently broke the top coil off - it was just loose in the tube.

With the tube out of the slider remove the internal snap ring at the lower end of the tube and pull the damper assy out of the tube. The dampers appear to be in pretty good condition even though they were running pretty much without oil (one fork did have a little oil in it but not enough to do any dampening, the other was bone dry).

Then pry the oil seal out of the top end of the slider. I always try to replace the seals when I take something apart even if they look good and were not leaking. They are relatively inexpensive and why take a chance that you're going to get everything back together again only to find that a couple of weeks or months down the road you have to do it all over again because of a leak.

With everything apart now I could reinsert the tubes in the slider to check for fit. I didn't have a dial indicator to measure the side play but I didn't need really one to tell me that they were well out of tolerance. So, off we go again to Custom MC Services to have new upper bushings installed in the sliders.

(More to follow.)

This page last updated on December 18, 2006