Resurrecting my sons 29er XC bike for university use. It has an old rockshox recon silver with a poploc – the remotes gone and was unreliable. Was wondering if there is an easy (and cheap) way of converting the switch on the fork crown to a more conventional “twist” type? Anyone got any idea?

You need the famous but elusive PeterPoddy guide.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1AoGIWBz4H1YWNhYWRkODYtNzRiNi00YTA1LTlmMjctNmQzOWQwMDdiZGFl/view?hl=en

If you are happy just to leave the fork in open position you can tie it off with a short bit of gear cable.

Can you not just leave it in the open position?  I found I almost never bothered with locking it out at all and just removed the remote to have less faff.  You could undo the internal spring but I think it defaults open so why not just leave it at that?  I’ve just got some discounted forks for my daughter without the remote and I’m just leaving it off.  If she ever gets to the stage where she wants to lock them out then she probably needs better forks 🙂

But, to answer your question, I would just lift the internal spring and then replace the grub screw in the top cap with something with a head to allow you to turn it by hand it you wanted to.  I might also put a plastic washer under the top cap to add a bit of friction as you are missing the ball bearings and springs that are normally there to provide detents. That was going to be my evening job before I found a Kwaremont beer in the fridge 🙂

Can’t remove the remote as for some stupid design reason the spring is set to lock out the fork without the cable tension. I assumed you could just buy a new top cap, but oh no, you need the whole unit for my sids which was 150 quid.

But then just leave a small stub of cable in and tighten it up with the grub screw to lock it open

Cheers Craig24 – that was exactly what I wanted! Now to pretend I am a suspension engineer!