Mithrandir

What sort of sound is the squeak? Is it metal on metal or somerhing else. Could you give me more idea on the "nature" of the squeaking sound to help work out what's going wrong? There could be many causes of it, including not putting the forks back on the bike properly, getting them slightly twisted etc.

So you're going to take the advice from a guy that earns his money rebuilding forks for a living, and therefore it is in his vested interest to convince you to pay him money? Not only that but every other suspension expert in that thread (and elsewhere) completely disagree with his solutions. Sure your bike will feel better after the rework, but for the same amount of money that you've spent on it, it could feel vastly better than what you'll be getting. All I'm trying to say, is don't believe everything that you're told. Research first, particularly when you have other people contradicting what one person was saying. Go look about on the net for pages on how to rebuild forks. Give me a couple of weeks and my stuff to turn up, and I'll write up and show you exactly what tools are needed to do fork rebuilds - all of about 6 things.

Warchild, as someone who has rebuilt somewhere in the order of 30-40 forks, let me tell you that you're being fed a some pretty big amount of bullshit there. Unless you are pulling apart Ohlins forks, you don't need any special tools whatsoever. Everything you can get at your local sears. That photo - 90% of the parts are the washers in the shimstacks. Also, you don't seem to know what you're looking at with the second picture. Look at the size of the holes in the ohlins compared to the showa. The holes are at least double the diameter, which means 4 times the amount of fluid travelling through them at any one time. When you hit a sharp bump, that makes a huge difference to the front of the bike. When he's saying the showa valves are Ok, he's talking for race bikes on a race track where you don't have to deal with large bumps like street riding. In fact, I think he's talking crap about them being 'as good as' anything else - and so does every other suspension expert (got look at the archives of the wera boards for a discusion in this. The thread was about 2 months ago). For street riding, on street bikes, what you want is the biggest hole size you can get in the valves. This allows a lot of oil to flow as fast as possible in order to deal with big shocks that are typical of road riding (potholes, tar snakes, concrete separators on slab etc). Opening the holes then means you control the damping rates at all points using the shimstack. When you go to a race track, this is not the ideal setup because flowing too much oil will put pressure on the shimstack causing the shims to bend, which then changes the damping characteristics. So race valves use smaller holes to control the oil. The other reason that he's talking crap is that in suspension - particularly race suspension, you want to run as thin an oil as possible. Heating causes the oil to thin, and the thicker the oil to start with, the more difference that makes. As the oil changes viscosity, the damping characteristics change. So the idea is to go really lightweight oil to avoid this as much as possible and then control the damping with the valves and shimstacks. Typically you aim to use 5W oil in the forks and 5-7W in the shock (although some will use 10W). Standard, all Honda forks come with ATF in them, which is about 8W. And, just to let you know I'm not just talking out my arse here, when I was working on my VTR forks I first just changed the springs and played with the oile weights and viscosity. Since I couldn't get it right, I then started tweaking the shimstacks. That helped a bit but not huge amounts. Really sharp bumps still screwed the handling up. Finally I put the ST valves in and that made a huge difference. The freer flowing ports is what really makes a difference. I've been through every state of tune you can do to forks on a single bike and so I know the exact effects of each modification. If you don't believe me, jump straight from your bike onto someone that has had the RT valve treatment done to it (or onto mine if you're ever up this way) and you will notice a big difference in handling.

G2 - That's close to rip-off prices. A fork rebuild should cost no more than $500 absolute maximum. Springs are $110, valves are $160 so he's basically charging you $500 for labour. That's two days worth of work! I can strip, rebuild and refit a set of forks in two hours and I don't do it as my day job. For that cost - send me the forks and I'll do the work for $400.... Well - I'm half serious about the last bit. Seriously - at $730 you're getting reamed really badly.

http://www.suspensiontech.com They're a NZ based company. The website is quite badly out of date though. I've been talking with them trying to establish where the US dealers are. It's been a slow process as the owner got badly injured in a MX accident about a month ago. He did say at one stage that he has a dealer "in NY" but I have no further information than that. I'd like to do small volume imports of their gear myself, but it's been hard trying to chat with them about it under the current circumstances. The kit I've got coming over is full rebound + compression valves and compression pistons. Total cost is US$150. Hoping they'll be here mid next week and will fit them the weekend after.

The simple answer is - how much cash do you have. Springs are a must do, but valving is less critical. If you have the money definitely spend it on the valves because it makes a huge difference to the front of the bike. I wouldn't bother with the Ohlins valve kits - they're made for racing not road riding. The RaceTech or SuspensionTech are the way to go. I prefer the latter because they're hardened aluminium which means they don't wear as fast as the brass racetechs.

you'll just have to learn to land those wheelies a bit better then to avoid the headshakes.... :wink:

Don't forget that it helped you to look years younger, gave you bigger, more fuller-looking breasts, and you earnt $10,000 per month that you took to change it!