124 wrote:I attempted my first fork job this past weekend. I consider myself capable so I had no issues with doing this job myself. There are a few things to watch out for.
The outer chamber (fork legs) are relatively easy to change without incident. Follow the instructions here from Smash and the Honda manual.
The inner chamber gets a bit complicated. You must add a certain amount of fluid, measure, then bleed amount a certain amount of fluid (195 and 17 respectively, I recall) and then reassemble. Honda recommends replacing the ENTIRE inner chamber and damper asm ($300) if there are issues bleeding the inner chamber.
This is where my story begins. I couldn't get the inner to bleed. In fact, all 195ml of the expensive fork oil come pouring out everytime I try to bleed the inner system. I called my suspension guy (in a panic) and explained I was doing my forks myself and I was bringing him an already disassembled assembly and he needed to fix it.I love it when people do that to me...
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Needless to say, Honda does not explain that the inner chamber won't bleed when the "Inner Chamber Seal" goes bad. Nor do they explain how to change that seal. This is how they collect the $300 from newbies thinking they jacked something up. I was assured from JP that I did things correctly and that seal "just goes bad sometimes..."
Factory Connection sells the seal for the low price of $20The shop did me a favor (since I needed everything done ASAP) and currently is finishing things up for me today. Turns out BOTH inner chamber seals were bad and I now have about a $165 bill.
Thinking...
$60 drivers
$15 fork cap wrench
$75 Pivotworks fork rebuild kit
$25 2 qts fork oil.
---bad inner chamber seal--- changes the game to:
ADD
$100 labor
$25 for 2 more qts of fork oil
$40 for 2 seals
=$340
Learning that sometimes its just cheaper to take the fuggen things in and have the guy with the purpose built suspension bench do the work...priceless.
P.S. Thanks to Jeff over at JPSpeed and Bumpworks. Folks around here can check them out at www.JPSpeed.biz
kerrycorcoran wrote:oh great, just what i wanted to hear. this is hte first post i have read with this mention...now i am not so confident in doing this myself. i am not nervous about the job at hand, just the extended downtime if it doesn't go as planned.
~ wrote:As long as the rebound rod extends to the full position, you've bled it correctly. If the floating piston seal is bad, it will not extend fully and fluid will continue to come out the two bleed holes.
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