Fork Upgrade

The photos below are from my fork upgrade, the whole thing took about a couple of hours and was surprisingly pain free :-)

My New Forks!

First Job is to remove my front pannier mounts

Front Pannier mounts removed along with all brackets.

Two bolts required to remove the disc brake from the old fork

disc brake bolts removed and carefully placed

The now free disc brake hanging by it's cable

Headset Cover Ready for removal

Headset cap removed

Getting ready to remove the headset two bolts

Headset Removed

one bolt to free the brake cable

For some reason the photographs of removing the old forks disappeared, but it was simply a matter of pulling them out slowly and retaining the bearing and bearing seats in the right order.

Greasing up the bearings top and bottom

More bearings being greased

fitting the bearings onto the new forks

greasing up the bottom of the forks

Putting it the new forks in

Putting it all back together was straight forward.  The only issue came with the slight difference in spacers needed.  Fortunately the fork came with some spacers and combined with my old ones i had a perfect fit.  I was prepared to do some filing if necessary.

New Forks Fitted

New forks fitted different angle

I am unhappy with the cable routing so I am going to play around with this over the weekend and refit my front pannier hanger.  The route for the front brake has changes so I am going to think about best placement for that.

One thing I did notice was that the was a wear line on my old forks where cables had rubbed the paint away and the same evidence on the new forks.  I  have a plan of action, I am going to buy some of that car touch up paint to cover the bear metal and then I am going to put some tape over the affected areas to prevent further rubbing.  I will post pictures when I have done it.

I went for a brief ride last night to test it out and honestly locking out the suspension makes a world of difference on the road.

I have a couple of things in mind left to do one of them is to see if I can upgrade these forks with a remote lockout cartridge (under investigation).   

I am going to go for a ride this weekend and when I am back I will do a thorough service on the bike, strip and re lubricate the chain and clean and lubricate front and rear mechs.