Rock Shox Reba dust/wiper seals – what am I doing wrong?

Bought some A2 Rebas secondhand (couple of years old) and thought I’d give them a service before putting them on the bike.

Looked up the serial number on the RS site, bought the basic service kit. Old seals came off easily enough. New ones? Absolutely no way. Tried oil, fork grease, bought a proper Unior seal tool, stuck the seals in the freezer and left the forks in the sun, absolutely not going in. Was tapping so hard I started getting worried about damaging the lowers.

Are they supposed to be this tight? Could I have the wrong ones? There’s videos of people just seating these things with their thumbs. Any other tips for getting these things in?

Annoyingly there are different versions of the Reba seals.

This is dead useful:

https://trailhead.rockshox.com/en/

Code ending 420 is what I ordered.

But then spares catalog has two different kits:

Although a single wiper kit part number for A1 – A4:

Have you got some calipers to measure existing seals and new ones to compare?

and is everything removed from the seal bores in the lowers?

😂 old ones are at the bottom of the bin. Will have to dig out at lunchtime and check.

As some one else said there are two size Reba seals. If they are that hard to get in they’re the wrong size.

Thank you very much both. Putting them side by side the new one has a flange which the old one doesn’t. New is about 1mm larger in diameter too.

The numbers stamped on them led me to this: https://forums.mtbr.com/shocks-suspension/reba-dust-seal-help-1095840.html

So it looks like the forks are a bit later than I thought, and that the Rockshox serial number checker is totally wrong. Boost forks seem to use flangeless, non-boost have flanges.