Have been looking at some marzocchi 55s. A quick google suggests early ones were awful and later ones are much better. Is this the case? How old might these be and which bracket would they fall into?

Dating a 55s

Top tip: take flowers and chocolates or they’ll own you.

2008ish

ATA can be good or bad, it was the death of the AM’s and the early TST carts had a habbit of dieing I think

2007-09 were the wilderness years. The colour scheme, sticker design and top cap design look like the 2009 55Rs I had.

The rebound damper (ie. Only bit of “tech” inside the fork) died just out of warranty.

My 2010 RC3TIs are by some distance the best forks I’ve had, combining modern fork performance with old skool Bomber reliability.

My ’09 55Rs for comparison. Same fixed lever ratchet-style QR too.

So heavy they had their own gravitational field, about 7lbs IIRC 😯 . The Revelations that replaced them were closer to half that.

Wouldnt touch them unless mega cheap, whatever is inside them is likely to fail so the more they have the more there is to go wrong (if it hasnt already).

its a 2008 model.
overall feedback/reviews seems to be they were very much hit and miss performance/reliability wise. the TST cartridge seems to be the major issue with them.
the forks that you’re looking at could be an absolute dog of a fork or could be perfect….hard to tell.
marzocchi were great up until 2007 when they hit the skids and it wasnt up until around 2010 when things started to improve.

as above – 08/09 vintage. I’d probably steer clear unless a total bargain.
You could be lucky and a dodgy cartridge may have been replaced sometime in their lifetime – have the current owners any feedback on warranty/servicing?

My 2010 RC3’s have the date of manufacture on a small casting mark somewhere near the bottom of one of the legs. Worryingly they were built in 2009…

My 2010 RC3’s have the date of manufacture on a small casting mark somewhere near the bottom of one of the legs. Worryingly they were built in 2009…

so do my 2010 RC3s. Only means the lowers were cast in 2009, not that the forks were built then. The internals are completely different, have proved reliable, and Marz had enough confidence to offer the 3yr no-service-interval warranty. Made sense for them to keep the design/tooling of the lowers when they overhauled the fork design to save on costs.