My bike has entry level forks and they’ve lost a lot of travel, so I reckon they need some TLC. Not worth sending it to a shop, and I’m trying to be more self reliant so fancy having a go at home.

I’ve found a set of instructions which look easy enough to follow (bike radar I think) and wanted to check whether I definitely need to remove the forks from the headset/frame before whipping off the lower’s for cleaning?

I’ve not got a headset press, which I believe I need to reassemble everything at the end if I did separate the forks from the rest of the bike.

Damage preventing advice would be appreciated. 🙂

STOP!!!!!!!!!

Put the headset press down.

Have a look at some more guides, the headset press is for fitting the headset not putting the fork back in.

Firstly to do a service you will need
The right tools
Space
Cleaning stuff
Fork Oil

You may also need seals

If there is a problem with the damper you might be able to fix it but might need o-rings etc.

Just saying….

Whats the fork and maybe someone will have some first hand experience to say if it’s a 30 min job or pointless.

Are they suntours perchance?

If they are suntours, spend 30 minutes doing what I did last weekend (on Suntour XCM-LO on my Decathlon Big RR 5.3).

Turn bike upside down – watch accumulated water flow out….
Remove wheel
Remove brake caliper
Loosely undo allen bolts at the foot of the lowers.
Tap gently to budge things inside
With one foot on the bars (it is still upside down!), pull off the lowers, taking care not to bend them.
Clean vigourously inside the lowers
Polish up the stancions, dry them off, grease up liberally (I just used bog standard TF2 red as that’s all I had around)
Grease the insides of the seals on the lowers liberally.
Reassemble.
Discover that your forks once again have some movement. But they are still crap.
Google more expensive forks.
Drool a little.
Realise SWMBO won’t let you spend money.
Tidy stuff away.

(i.e. no need to remove forks from the frame or worry about losing bearings from the headset, or reassembling. Just cleaning and lubing the lowers works fine)

STOP!!!!!!!!!

Put the headset press down.

Have a look at some more guides, the headset press is for fitting the headset not putting the fork back in.

Firstly to do a service you will need
The right tools
Space
Cleaning stuff
Fork Oil

You may also need seals

If there is a problem with the damper you might be able to fix it but might need o-rings etc.

Just saying….

Whats the fork and maybe someone will have some first hand experience to say if it’s a 30 min job or pointless.

Good news! I do not own a headset press ([noob]that may be obvious from the poor understanding of what a headset press does[/noob]). Thanks for the pointers, I shall go and have a Google. 🙂

Are they suntours perchance?

They are indeed; XCRs.

If they are suntours, spend 30 minutes doing what I did last weekend (on Suntour XCM-LO on my Decathlon Big RR 5.3).

Turn bike upside down – watch accumulated water flow out….
Remove wheel
Remove brake caliper
Loosely undo allen bolts at the foot of the lowers.
Tap gently to budge things inside
With one foot on the bars (it is still upside down!), pull off the lowers, taking care not to bend them.
Clean vigourously inside the lowers
Polish up the stancions, dry them off, grease up liberally (I just used bog standard TF2 red as that’s all I had around)
Grease the insides of the seals on the lowers liberally.
Reassemble.
Discover that your forks once again have some movement. But they are still crap.
Google more expensive forks.
Drool a little.
Realise SWMBO won’t let you spend money.
Tidy stuff away.

(i.e. no need to remove forks from the frame or worry about losing bearings from the headset, or reassembling. Just cleaning and lubing the lowers works fine)

Thanks Larkin, that sounds like exactly what I wanted to do, just to know if they should be on or off the bike. Wife’s away this weekend so looks like I can do it indoors on the sly. 😛

Pssht new forks. Definitely an excuse for a new bike…

Order some shiny forks and install them while she is away 🙂

Edit: mine is actually an XCR, not XCM, so on that basis you should have a very similar experience to me.

There was an excellent youtube video [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvaPjoIA_tI[/video] which I followed the first time I did it on my son’s bike, but subsequently I realised there really was little need to take the fork off the bike at all, particularly if you were OK with working on it upside down. Made the job far far quicker.

Just make sure that you don’t dislodge the bushings inside the fork lowers when you are cleaning things up. Even if you did nothing at all other than remove the lowers, apply grease in every conceivable place and reassembled you’ll find you have forks back to near day 1 functionality.

The downside is that this doesn’t turn them into anything more than entry level coil shocks which really should be replaced by something nicer!

Sorry to hijack the thread but would the method shown in the video also be suitable for a set of rock shox Tora that haven’t been touched in about 4 years?

Did you search youtube?

Thanks Larkim, helpful advice much appreciated!

Toras …..

https://sram-cdn-pull-zone-gsdesign.netdna-ssl.com/cdn/farfuture/xbxuQEpdkBmJdQ16n0Kpua0zxa-NELqa05ZWhJA-6wc/mtime:1372788148/sites/default/files/techdocs/tm_my102.pdf

If These ain’t your model year, there are most of them on the SRAM site as pdf.

Hurray slightly springier forks! Thanks for the help. 🙂