When I got home with that broken fork, I immediately went down to my basement. Took the thing apart and found, that the dampening cartridge hat separated. And I realized this was totally my fault.
When I got the bike "new" first thing I did was to take the fork apart and look at the state of the inner fork legs. They were good, so I slid out the dampener. It was the plastic body type. They were known to break and RS replaced them with aluminium types in later models. I had a alu-type sitting in a drawer and I used that when putting the fork back together. But.
All the judys I had before were XCs and _this_ was a DH. More travel. Longer dampening cardridge. I did not think about this :roll:
So this is how that cartridge came out of the fork leg:
Luckily nothing was damaged. The oil seal had slid out of the body, that's all.
To take advantage of the situation, I measured the oil seal for later reference. Should I decide to overhaul one of these.
The RS partnumber is 56404. It is a standard oil seal with two "lips" (one oil seal lip with spring, one dust wiper). It measures 10-22-7 mm (that is inner diameter/outer diammeter/width) for example:
AS-10-22-07
There are two of those seals needed per cartridge.
(There is a little O-ring sealing the adjustment screw inside the main rod, I forgot to measure it...)
Next thing was to use the two best preserved seals in the plastic-DH-type cartridge, fill it with fesh oil (ATF II automatic transmission oil = cheap replacement for 7wt fork oil) and pop everything back together. Had a quick discussion on the german ibc-forum about how to correctly fill the thing. Found out, that there is al little rod/screw ininside the hollowed main rod. It is used to adjust the dampening rate and also to fill the oil and get rid of air bubbles.
Until then it was 1 o'clock in the night so the test ride had to wait for the next day.
