Friday, February 6, 2015

Spares: New Fork Inspection and Cleaning

New forks... first impression is that I'm surprised to find they're painted.  But it's a dark grey, almost the color I had in mind for Red anyway.

Then I got scared because it looked like the bottom axle holders had been welded into place for some reason.  Then I realized that what I thought were weld beads were actually just where they had painted over the grime!

The bolts were on pretty tight, plus they were painted over, but they came off with the help of the breaker bar.  Figuring out just how to lock the fork in the vice was probably the hardest part of the whole thing.

Then I proceeded to getting the housings off.  The left side came off pretty easily, but the right was very stubborn.  When I tried cranking down hard while it was in the vice, I ended up moving the vice (cutting deeply into the wood step).

I ended up putting the vice on a piece of firewood just to brace it, then knocking on the pin wrench with the rubber mallet.  That worked.

But then I realized that the slider was absolutely locked into place and would not budge a millimeter.  While contemplating strategies for getting it off (strap wrench, etc) I just kept whacking on the bottom end with the rubber mallet.  Low and behold, it suddenly came loose.

Disassembling the fork seal housings, I came across something very interesting.  On both of them, the 29mm ID metal ring was loose and came out easily.  And what I found was that underneath that, the rubber seal also has its own metal ring at the top (just like Bill on Yahoo said).  But I could see how there could be confusion over this if you're not clear which one you're talking about.

Surprisingly, the interiors of both forks were very clean, and the chrome was in good shape.  So we end up with 2 very good forks painted a convenient color.










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