TL;DR: title. What do?

Got some 150mm Pike RC forks from Alltricks November last year. A little while ago I noticed all damping (rebound and compression adjustment) had gone. Decided to take a look and a lot more than the recommended 5mm fell out of the lower when I opened it up.

Got a bleed kit and almost 100mm of oil went in to the damper. All was good, until today. It’s now back to having no rebound or compression adjustment.

What could cause this? Is there anything that can be done, or is it an RMA job?

It’s the damper head seal. 2016 one is supposed to be better. The damper service kit also has one in it.

Mine does this and I’ll live with it until ICBA to fix it. If I had from new (mine 2nd hand) I’d probably fix it myself rather than sending back to France.

Mate had this and end up with a specially machined rod for the damper from Australia

This thing?

NS Dynamics

It can also be the silver part of the damper unscrewing from upper black part. Seen a few do it including mine.

This thing?

NS Dynamics

I had the same happen and fitted one of those, but I think you have to buy them direct from Australia, Amazon won’t allow you to buy from the US. The 2016 RockShos sealhead is upgraded and a straightforward swap on 650b and 29er forks. If your forks are 26″ you also have to fit a replacement damper tube I think, which ups the cost.

Anyway, the NS Dynamics replacement has fixed it so far, but it’s slightly lame that a relatively expensive fork should have this inherent flaw in the first place.

Service will sort as it’s the wiper seal in seal head that causes issues.

RS have a new service kit due out with an uprated wiper/scraper seal, which will be similar to the NS one (strangely enough I think used to work with NS when he was over in the UK)

The seal gets a pretty hard life due to very little lubricating oil in the damper leg so the oil gets contaminated quicker and the amount of flex it will have to deal with.

When is the new, uprated seal out?

You can also measure it up & use an O ring in it’s place-works a treat 😉

ooh – tell me more!

Nothing more to tell than that, make sure it’s the perfect size to replace the leaky one & job done.

That would work, (an o ring) but a dual lip wiper scraper is better suited to the application.

Hopefully the new unrated seal head kit should be available in a month or so, although we’re investigating other seals at the moment 😉

I agree the updated deal will (should) be better, but an O ring works well & a damn sight better than than what’s usually fitted to them as standard! (IMO of course, but what do I know..)

TF use a different seal when they service. Same design, just different material iirc. Has lasted so far after mine were services for having the damper dump it’s load.

There’s some great stuff in this thread, super helpful, thanks guys.

O-ring looks like the first thing to try, if it’s not simply something loose like twohats suggests.