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So I came to my hardtail yesterday after its last clean and spray ,its using Rockshox Revelations 2018s and noticed that they would not compress as if locked out , After dropping all the air out and removing the air valve and tokens it still wouldn't compress fully, what the hell can it be , perhaps the damper has died in a monumental way ?
Any ideas before I remove the lowers and cry
Oil leak from damper into lowers? Pos/Neg air chamber not equalizing?
Is the 'hidden' schrader valve still on the 2018s? (Depressurize, take off the airside footnut, stick a little allen key up there and push the valve. You may get a little hiss of satisfaction and full travel.)
If that second thing appears to sort it, there may be a blob of grease blocking the transfer port which equalizes the pressures. It's a little dimple on the airshaft higher up which is supposed to let air move across when the fork is compressed.
Nothing kills forks unless the uppers or lowers get physically bent, or possibly some damper parts if they are old. You can replace most stuff.
As above - forks not compressing probably means oil has leaked into somewhere it shouldn't. A full service will almost certainly fix, but there may be other fork specific things to try so try martinhutch's expertise first.
Its probably suffering from a broken compression damper.
I've had similar (but not quite as drastic) on my older Revs. The oil leaks out of the damper into the bottom of the leg. It means the fork can't fully compress as it's trying to squash the oil, and the lockout doesn't work as there's no oil in the damper to use for resistance.
I posted about this a few days ago... take em apart and have a look if you can. Mine was well broken 🙂 https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/how-broken-is-my-moco-damper/
If its a 2018 fork and you've owned from new then it will be within its 2 year warranty period. This may be compromised if you've been dismantling the fork yourself though. Lots of the 35mm Revelations had issues with the base of the compression damper window snapping and becoming jammed in the locked setting. Your best bet is to get the fork back to Sram Tech Centre for inspection.
Had the same issue with my 2018 revs which came fitted to my Whyte S150, did the lower leg service couldn't see anything untoward so took them back to Leisure Lakes who sent them of the Sram, 3 days later got a new set of Pikes free of charge so big thumbs up to LL & Sram.
If they're out of warranty then get them back to Sram for a service anyway seems to be a common fault.