I bought a Marzocchi Z5 fork off ebay last week and it arrived today. I believe it's the 99 model (the seller thought it was and it also had no disc brake mounts). I've recently finished building my own bike up and had so many bits left I thought I'd put the old one back together in case someone wants to use it like once a year! So the forks were the one things missing so I tried to find something cheap on ebay, and the z5's fitted the bill.
Had a couple of problems though. I've contacted the seller so I'll just paste my message to him below so you can all see what's up and hopefully help me out;
The first issue came with the actual fitting. My stem would not fit smoothly onto the steerer. It was an extremely tight fit. The only way I could get the stem to fit was to use a mallet to hammer it on. Luckily it didn't damage the stem but by fitting it this way it presented another problem. I was not the able to use the top cap to fine tune the tension in the headset, as the stem had been fitted too tightly. As I had to fit the stem with the mallet there was no way of doing it gently and this essentialy compressed the headset too much, resulting in very stiff steering.
I'm not sure what could have happend to the steerer but it is either enlarged or misshapen. The stem came straight off another fork with a 1 1/8 steerer so I know it is not the stem at fault.
The othe issue I had was, although the steering was not working correctly due to the overtensioned headset, I still wanted to try out the forks and see if they were working well. I refilled them with air as you said. However, they were still compressing easier than I would expect, but the main problem was they were not rebounding. They would almost bottom out and then not come back up again. However much air I put in I had this same problem. I don't suppose you know the exact PSI they should be set to do you? As I am having a problem finding instructions for this particular model and year online as the are so old.
THANKS GUYS!!!
Had a couple of problems though. I've contacted the seller so I'll just paste my message to him below so you can all see what's up and hopefully help me out;
The first issue came with the actual fitting. My stem would not fit smoothly onto the steerer. It was an extremely tight fit. The only way I could get the stem to fit was to use a mallet to hammer it on. Luckily it didn't damage the stem but by fitting it this way it presented another problem. I was not the able to use the top cap to fine tune the tension in the headset, as the stem had been fitted too tightly. As I had to fit the stem with the mallet there was no way of doing it gently and this essentialy compressed the headset too much, resulting in very stiff steering.
I'm not sure what could have happend to the steerer but it is either enlarged or misshapen. The stem came straight off another fork with a 1 1/8 steerer so I know it is not the stem at fault.
The othe issue I had was, although the steering was not working correctly due to the overtensioned headset, I still wanted to try out the forks and see if they were working well. I refilled them with air as you said. However, they were still compressing easier than I would expect, but the main problem was they were not rebounding. They would almost bottom out and then not come back up again. However much air I put in I had this same problem. I don't suppose you know the exact PSI they should be set to do you? As I am having a problem finding instructions for this particular model and year online as the are so old.
THANKS GUYS!!!
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