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Today I did my first seal and oil replacement on a FOX fork. I’d watched Erik do his before, but it was a few years back so I didn’t remember much about the process. While I took my time this was easier than I’d expected, and almost everything went smoothly.
To do this work I’d purchased a bottle of 10 weight (Green) Suspension Fluid, a SKF low friction seal kit, 5mL packet of Float Fluid, and a seal driver tool to help seat the seals. I’d also picked up some graduated cylinders for measuring the oil, and a friend made me a very nice tool for removing the top caps. These parts all worked out very well, and following FOX’s documentation for seal and oil replacement, oil volumes, and use of the seal driver I had no problems getting everything together.
The greatest difficulty was removing the old seals, but a little persistance on the first one paid off, and then using this as a model I was able to get the second out much more easily. There were a few small things learned that’ll make the work easier next time, including:
· The foam rings take very little time to soak up oil when pre-soaking them.
· Once the damper is in place, there’s not much room below the damper cap for adding oil unless air is let out of the spring side to collapse the fork. After this there’s a plenty large space to pour in the oil.
· Tilting the fork while adding oil to the damper side makes things slightly easier.
· The nuts on the bottom of each fork leg are identical.
· Crush washers stick solidly to the nuts on the fork legs and blend in. The replacement ones, before being crushed, fit much more easily.
· Suspension oil tends to get all over the place. Even with wiping the entire fork down there is still an oily residue which leaves a nice sheen, especially if the fork is a bit weathered and becoming matte.
I received this fork when I purchased this bike in December of 2009. Since that time I’d put around 5000 miles on the bike, but never rebuilt the fork nor replaced the oil. While I’d been particular about keeping the stanchions clean I was not shy about riding it in poor conditions. FOX recommends changing the oil every 30 hours on forks. I definitely exceeded this, yet the oil in the fork was still quite clear, the foam rings mostly clean and oil-saturated, the stanchions unmarred, and there was still a fair amount of oil in the various chambers. The only way the stanchions look not-new is some fading on the portion which was exposed to sunlight. Here is a photo of the disassembled uppers and lowers showing nothing more than a slight bit of fading.
Hopefully after the work I’ve done the fork continues to work as reliably as it had for these past years.