Fork seal question(s).

I just got mine taken apart this weekend. The flat washer came out with the tapered cone, but no wavy washer, hope they are not damaged or lost, I will check tonite. The hardest part of the disassembly for me was getting the dust seal out without damaging the bottom tube, of course cleaning up fork oil everywhere was no picnic either. The hex head special tool was useless on mine too.

 

UPDATE!!! So I have everything apart & all has gone pretty well. I will be putting it all back together in the next few days. My questions are about "pressing" the oil seals & stuff in. I read about getting the 1" PVC, can someone explain this a bit better or give me any other ideas? The fork that had the blown seal was MUCH harder to get apart than the other fork.

All the tools and parts I ordered from Chacal are working great at this point.

 

PICTURES.

 

Actually, what I used was 1.5" PVC. I used my bench grinder to grind a bit of a taper on one end. Original OD was 48.3mm, I ground the taper down to 46.5mm or so. This allowed it to just fit into the fork leg opening. Overall length about 21".

To use it, I clamped the fork leg in my vise's round object jaws, wrapped in one of those foamy lattice place mats. I put the stanchion in place in the leg, and use the PVC, with a small block of wood on top of it and driven by a hammer, to seat the boss... similar use to seat the seal (with grease inside and out), and dust cover (also greased).

Cheers,
Paul

 

Thanks for the pic and info SQLGuy. I bought some PVC pipe last night, but I need to get one more piece that is small enough to seat the bushing & oil seal. Last night I cleaned & inspected all of my parts and reassembled the damper rod pieces.

Tonight I hope to get the seals seated, the oil measured and everything buttoned up so I can put it all back on the bike. Wish me luck, so far there have been no major problems on my part. Which is a small feat in itself.

 

Ok so I'm done with my seal installation and everything is put back together. I put the recommended amount of air in the forks and took it for a ride. The handling is MUCH improved and I feel more confident riding it now.

However, there is an unusual noise when the front suspension is really compressed. It sounds like a spring being compressed or something. I did install new progressive springs, but I don't know if this could be contributing to the noise or not.

Any ideas or suggestions would be great.

Thanks.