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  • Reba Oil Leak
  • xraymtb
    Free Member

    Need some help with my Reba’s. They are fitted to my SS bike which hasnt seen much use off road over the last year and have been performing fine as far as I can tell.

    Turned the bike upside down the other day when I removed the rear wheel – came back after 20 mins or so and the top of the damper side had leaked oil onto the floor – a pool around 4 inches by 2 inches.

    Cleaned it up and turned them back the right way – they still seem fine but having looked on the SRAM website, I can only see talk of replacing the oil in the lower legs – all 10ml of it. I cant see that much oil being what leaked given the size of the pool. From what I can tell the damper has around 130ml of oil in there but I cant find any instructions for replacing that oil?

    Do I need to send them in to be serviced or can I do something myself? Dont want to ride them if theres a chance of damage now that they have lost so much.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    its easy to do yourself, look for the full service manual on the site. i dont think they will be damaged riding with too little damping oil, you’ll just have crap damping. mine leak damping oil all the time.

    stumpy01
    Full Member

    Will more than likely be oil from the lowers – it does go quite a long way. I had a similar thing the other week with the air side of my Reba’s while camping. It could only be the lower leg lube and made quite a bit puddle.
    What Reba’s are they? I’ve got the dual air with remote lockout (with the small gold floodgate knob) and have had oil leak out when the fork is upturned, where the damper assembly passes through the top of the fork leg.

    Also, it’s quite possible that a small quantity of damper oil has leaked into the lowers over time (this seems to happen with most RS forks), but from the sounds of it the puddle you mention sounds about right.
    You could up-turn the fork, remove the nuts from the lowers, lift the lowers off the stanchions by about 30mm or so & then squirt a bit more lube into the damping side lowers using a syringe. Problem is that by the time you get it all bolted back together, the new oil will probably be starting to leak out.
    You probably need a new o-ring at the top of the damper leg to fully cure this, although a strip & re-build might help for a short time.

    There should be a full technical service manual on the Rockshox/SRAM site for your fork. It’s quite straight forward to service them, so long as you have new o-rings, circlips, oil & the right tools.

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    monkeyboyjc
    Full Member

    are they 2008 or earlier? if so its a common problem with the seals on the motion control damper, I had the same issue and sent mine to TF tuning explaining the problem who replaced the apropriate seals with teh uprated 2009 ones. Alternatively you’ll need to top them up with oil on a regular basis (depending on how much you ride).

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