For a while the forks on the hardtail have been a little sticky to say the least. By “sticky” I mean that they were entirely seizing up between rides, to only be freed up each week by a liberal application of my entire body weight to get them going again. Clearly this wasn’t ideal, and I had been toying with the idea of replacing them, or, perhaps facing the disgust of a bike shop to get them serviced, when my hand was slightly forced.
It was during this muddy and drizzly ride that things came apart a little.
The dust seal on one leg became detached and it was followed by the remnants of the sponge lubrication thing below. Luckily the fork still managed to work for the remains of the ride, but it was definitely time to consider my options around them.
In the next week a new set of forks arrived after I ordered a very reasonably priced Rock Shox Recon, which, while looking cheap, offered 100mm of new smooth air travel. While I was at it I got a new headset, for two very good reasons. Firstly, I really couldn’t be bothered with trying to remove the crown race from the old forks, and secondly the bottom bearing race on the old headset appeared to be totally unmoving as well. All of these new parts set up a fun morning of the scariest type of bike maintenance. Basically all of the jobs involved in fitting a new fork and headset involve bashing stuff pretty hard, so i was slightly nervous as I approached the Saturday morning session.
Taking the fork out was straight forward and I was quickly into the hitting a screwdriver hard to remove the headset cups bit. This went well, and the new ones went in with a bit of bashing and a lot of pressing with an improvised big bolt and washers set-up. The next scary job is to take the brand new fork you’ve just bought and chop a lump of it off with a hacksaw. I got through this with minimal sweating and a slightly sharp edge left on the steerer to cut my finger on. Bleeding but unbowed I found a hoover tube and used it to subtly bash the new crownrace into place. After more bashing to get the star nut in place, more or less, I slotted everything together in a final flurry of bolting rather than bashing, and went for a ride.
Very pleasingly nothing fell apart and I didn’t fall catastrophically through the front of the bike wrecking my face or anything else I might have used to break my fall, so I finished the ride pretty pleased with my competency as a bike mechanic. Also, I had a revitalised front end to the bike which ran much smoother than the last fork.
That previous fork was ripe for some servicing, not least to see what might be wrong with it. After some research and more bashing over a few days I was able to remove the lowers and find the cause of the sticking. It would seem that the forks had been running for a long while only lubricated by some brown sludge, which might explain the performance issues. I’m debating rebuilding them, but it may be a lost cause.
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