How To Disassemble/Clean/Lube/Re-assemble RST Gila T5 Forks

hey viewers well I'm continuing to work on the specialized hardrock here and so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to disassemble clean and lube and reassemble the rst guilty five shots so I'm gonna start off by removing the front wheel I may have to put this back on again for disassembly and I'll come to that when I get there and since I'm going to need to drop the lowers down I can either disconnect the brake right here or I'm just going to go ahead and remove the brake here and pull this out and then just put this aside there for now and I'm just gonna put the screw back in here for now so I don't lose it now what I want to do is release the lowers to drop down there are underneath here there are two bolts it's a four millimeter allen wrench you need to go ahead and remove these so go ahead and unscrew these and they may or may not come out easily what sometimes might happen is as you turn them the part inside here will also turn in kick in which case you won't get the screw out so I got that one out no problem now let's try this other one here now this one is just turning and turning and turning so I may need help to do this one okay in order to get this part loose and here this bolt here I need to keep this part in here from turning so what I did was I put the front wheel on and I have a helper and she's going to go ahead and put weight down on the handle ours to compress the shock and that will hopefully keep this party in here from turning so now with an Allen wrench I'm gonna reach up in here and then just unscrew this and there I got the bolt out now that I have those two bolts out I should be able to just go ahead and drop these lowers down and release them from there now there's a couple of little plastic parts that go on here that might get stuck down inside the lowers using like a little bit of a hanger here with a lit made like a little hook at the bottom here I can reach down inside the little part go through it hook it up and then carefully guide it out through the top here there like that and then those those go like on there like that now I want to go ahead and remove the stats from the top tubes here I need to remove these caps in order to remove these caps you could use just a pair of vise grips turn them off but I made a tool here that just makes it a little easier and if you click the link on the screen they'll take you to a video on how I made this little tool it's just made from a socket I've got a ratchet wrench here and what I'm gonna do is just unscrew these top caps here and there's one stack right there and then remove this one and remove this stack here now that I have like the stacks here and here's the little parts that we're at the bottom removed I'm going to go ahead and use like a cleaner to try to get rid of a lot of the old grease to clean it off because then we're going to applies brand new grease okay and then here's here's the stack there's the spring at the bottom of the spring there's all plastic part go ahead and unscrew this and if you kind of shake that out there's a couple elastomers in there so go ahead and pull those out and the same thing on the other side we want to want to clean all these as well okay I've got these parts pretty well cleaned up I also used a little bit of warm soap and water to kind of get the grease off and a scrub brush on there and most of the grease is off there there's still a little bit on there but I don't care if the little bits still on there I got most of it off okay wipe these parts off here like that get that grease off now used like the degreaser to clean the upper tube to get all the old grease off of these and if there's anything on there that looks like a maybe a little bit of corrosion or something on here let me use a scotch brite pad here to gently scrub that and just see if I can kind of get that off sometimes there's just old dry grease or something on there and sometimes you can get it off sometimes you can't well it's tough still on there but it's at least a little bit smoother on there I'm not quite sure what that is maybe scratches in the surface but it is what it is now I want to clean out the inside of the lower so again I use some of the degreaser just spray this around in and in here then I have a piece of old t-shirt on the end of a hanger just kind of knot the hangers just kind of wrap around there so I'll use this to go ahead and clean out the inside of these tubes and just try to get a bunch of that old grease out of there that I may need to use another piece of t-shirt and try to dry it out as much as I can in here and then you can try cleaning out the uppers as well what you do is just take a piece of the t-shirt and just try to twist it down in there and work its way down in and kind of clean out some of this down in here as well again if you don't get all the grease that's okay you just want to try to get most of it and try to get a lot of the dirt out and everything the cleaner you can get it the better okay I'm ready to start putting this thing back together again rst simply says use a non lithium based grease so what let me use is marine grease the stuff that was in there seemed to be blue and submarine grease is blue so maybe that's what it was in in there I'm not sure so I'm just going to go ahead and coat the elastomer is a little bit here get some grease all around them slide it up into inside the spring there take the other one again put some marine grease around on there slide this up inside the spring there and then take the little plastic cap that I pulled off of there and then that just screws onto the spring to hold the elastomers into place and same thing with this one a little bit of marine grease there slide that up inside there ring grease coat that all up slide that up in there take the little plastic cap screw that on like this and then I want to get some grease all around the spring like that get it all nice and lubed so it's all going to move pretty nice and smoothly inside the tubes like that so that's all ready to go okay now I'm ready to install the stacks in there just slide these right in like this and then screw them in and make sure that they're threaded in nice and cleanly not cross threaded then use the tool to tighten them on like that and they don't need to be super tight they're just plastic you know what strip the threads out now when to go ahead and put these little parts that I took off of here off so there's these two little I guess they're like rubber and I want to put the this part facing up on both sides like that just run them up there and then I have these two little plastic parts and there's a little part inside here with this kind of tapered inside there and it's not on the other side so the little inset part there goes facing up so I can just slide that on there like this and then I want to put some grease down around inside these parts here like this just kind of fill those up a little bit and then kind of get the grease around the outside here like this like that so those are two slide up inside the the lower tubes they have the boots here let's slide these over they'll slide over the little plastic parts there I couldn't put all you put them on there and slide these up the uppers like this like that now I have the lowers here there's like a rubber seal at the top and there's like a little indent in there and I want to go ahead and feel fill the sole seal with grease when the grease all the way around inside there just go there's a little channel just fill that a little channel with grease in there like that now at this point I can go ahead slide the lowers up over these little parts here and then slide them up into place like that now I'm ready to reinstall these little screws in the bottom here they're going to go up into those little parts that are sticking down so it's a four millimeter allen wrench screw these up in there and they should be tight and this one over here again is just turning and turning so this part up here is is spinning so I can't get this screw tight so what I'm going to do is put the wheel back on and then have my helper push down on the handlebars to compress the shots so I can tighten that again okay so now I have my helper compressing that the shocks down and now go ahead and tighten this there that's all nice and tight okay I'm almost done here these little seals down here already kind of covered a little bit of grease on to the uppers but I'm just gonna go ahead and rub a little bit more around there just a light coating around here and then drop these boots down these are those top parts and then they lock into the top of the shocks to snap into place there then just wipe off any excess grease off of there like that now I want to reconnect the brake here just slide this on put the screw back in reattach the wheel we connect the brake noodle and done well that is how to disassemble clean lubricate five shocks I hope you found that helpful or at least interesting if you did please click the like button on my video I always appreciate getting likes on my videos it helps me out and if you're not subscribed on his channel please subscribe to my channel you can click the big yellow subscribe button here and that way you'll see new videos as I put them online anyway thank you very much watching

Channel: RJ The Bike Guy

Views: 604,265

Keywords: Bikes, RST, Rapid Suspension Technology, Shocks, Forks, Bicycle (Sports Equipment)

Id: 2eoE3iMyr50

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Fri May 30 2014