How-to Replace Fork Seals on WP AER Forks

hi guys this Jeff Elaine is racing this video is about how to change fork seals and the WP air fork a ER fork that comes on the XC XC f sx s XF and then the husky T X T C and F X and FC models so this is an air fork has no spring in it some guys are scared of that because you know they've it's uncharted territory for them but this is one of the easiest Forks there is to work on so well only special tool you need is a 50 millimeter fork cap wrench this is a factory one but we've got motion pro ones and a system decreasing ones that are all and I'm going to say around 16 to 18 dollar range something like that on our website Slavens racing comm so the first thing you got to do is put them in soft jaws if you don't have soft jaws you can loosen this fork cap while the forks are still on the bike so loosen the triple clamp bolts on the top here so it's not squeezing the outer fork tube because that does bind up the threads and then loosen the cap just you know quarter turn and then take the Forks off the bike or if you know some guys don't have vices that's a method for if you don't if you do have a vise but you don't have soft jaws you could put some blocks or wood in here and then put the fork and a miter 45 degree angle otherwise it's going to try to roll out but they shouldn't be on there very tight and that's that's how tight this one was so I'm just loosening it up is I'm going to go to the other end work on here [Music] so in this end you always want to clamp across here this is called the drop out this piece this is where the axle goes through sway sway about that noise if you put it in there this I've got these trays on here for working on suspension so that for cap I forgot to mention it looks different than what's on your bike this is what the stock one looks like that has an MX tech tack our cap yeah but this is what Stockman looks like you still use the same wrench for it I highly recommend that you do not use Crescent ranch or channel auction and these are pretty fragile and you can really nerf them up real quickly so from here I'm just going to take a flat blade screwdriver and pop out this rubber plug in order to take the cartridge out you have to remove this bolt here that's a 19 millimeter and those two different types of sockets there's a 12-point because it has 12 points or a 6 point the six point has what better contact is much less likely to round the voltage trying to remove this is aluminum so it means it's soft sometimes they're kind of stuck in there and if you're using a 12 point you're increasing your probability of rounding it off and if you do that you've got a big mess on your hands but I'm not gonna help you with on this video but you can tell what the sound of that that thing was in there pretty tight okay so that's all I wanted to do right now with soft jaws was loosen up both ends now I'm going to take the forks out of the vise after you've loosened both ends now it's time to drain the fluid out so I'm just unscrew the cap pour out the fluid now I'm going to turn it upside down and I'm gonna finish taking out the bolt on the bottom I look at the video here make sure you can see what I'm doing here now let's check that this way it's hard to tell when you're at the end of this so I'm gonna cartridge pulls out and it does ok now I've got the cartridge assembly out so you guys I'm doing this by myself so yeah it's a little bit tricky it's best if you take off this fork guard but I didn't just three bolts I should have taken it off but I didn't and then I've got a screwdriver here that I've ground on the end to make a really sharp nice but you can do it with a regular one as well and I get pop out this dust seal I remove the fork guard because it was in the way and I slid the death seal all the way up here now inside of here is a circlip and you can just just use a small screwdriver like this get it out throw our special tools what's not really needed I'm not you know like with all my videos I try to make it to where you guys at home don't have to go out and buy a bunch of special tools but you're going to use once or twice in your lifetime you know if you're professional mechanic then you should have them and right now so the circlip one side is angled in a direction that makes it hard to catch with the screwdriver the other side has got kind of a hook on it I'll show you it to you when it gives out so it just pops right out so this is the end that you wanting to catch right here this one you is a little bit harder to catch you can do it on me to one so from there you should actually heat this area of this is where the seal is sitting you should heat this with a torch I'm not going to do this that for this video because I'm sure you can figure that out just we're ready to butane torch is fine or an acetylene if you have one and the reason it's good to heat that up and so the seal will come out easier and you're less likely to do damage to the bushing and because the bushing might be in good condition you could reuse it so from there you use this kind of light driver pop it out now we've got the inner tube bushing the outer tube bushing there's a little washer here that helps the seal pushes against it instead of against the bushing and then you've got the seal this rotates and it's got a split end on it so it's a de Bush's what these are called so just take a screwdriver in there pry it open take it off this one should slide right off at this time you can inspect it safety any damage to it when you were removing it and did not now this when you pound on a part like that this one gets a little damaged so it gets cupped shape instead of being flat like it should be it's now got a cup to it and we sell these if you want to replace it or you can just set it on a flat surface at a pride here it's it's reasonably soft and you can make it flat again you don't really have to buy these every time although if you want we do have them and then you pull off the seal and wiper and the circlip from there I'm going to clean it up so I can inspect it and what I'm looking for here is like a nick or a scratch that might have damaged the seal I think this one was actually taken out from some mud but I'm gonna use some of the scotch brite and rub on it the Scotch blade does not damage the comb but you if there's a scratch or a nick in there you can feel it it will it will catch on there you can get scotch brite at a hardware store or Home Depot it's always kind of good just go over to anyhow get off any kind of a layer of crud that might be on there so I didn't feel anything I don't see anything wrong with this so I'm gonna just put a new seal on it clean out one more time get that possible grit off of there from that scotch brite so from here you need a seal bullet I mean you can put up plastic bag over the end or something like that because there's a sharp edge here and you will damage the seal sliding this head on if you don't use a seal bullet or a plastic bag I'm not a big fan of plastic bag things but you can this is a factory one which you can buy we've got them in stock almost much less expensive version I think they're about seven dollars six dollars something like that this just slides over and covers those sharp areas and then the new seal can slide right over that with all those seals that we sell we include a little complimentary pack of seal grease and we only sell SKF there's a lot cheaper seals out there they're all junk I've tested every single one of them I wouldn't even think about installing them the SKF sar by far are top of the line and there's a couple different models you want the green ones we've got a first selection these on our site for a lot of different brands of bikes so you definitely want to put a layer of grease in there first this is the same type of grease that comes with our seals when you buy a mat Slavens racing calm and just put it in there you know a layer of it there's there's no certain amount because if you put in too much it's it's just going to get wiped off when you slide it over the seal bullet so the dust seal goes on first just got a spring on it here the spring goats towards the bottom of the fork towards the axle drop out slide that on first and just slide it down and get it out of your way and as the circlip goes on next and you know just clean it inspect everything as you're putting it on some of you guys will live in the real wet climates you're in the u.s. like Northwest or back east or you guys living you know Central America wherever sometimes these circlips are really rusted doesn't mean that they're not usable they are but you'd have to put some work in it to clean them up sanim we do have these as well on our site next is the oil seal when you slide it over this part it's kind of rough here and I push this kind of hard but once you get up into here the slick part the tubing then it just goes right on them get that out of your way next thing is washer and I fixed this one so what works best for me is our like a dead blow hammer a compost hammer and I use the the opposite end of the vise almost all vices having an anvil type area there which it's flat you can set it on there and hit it with one of those hammers not hammer but deadblow hammer is at work so I just got off this big old thing wooden hammer worked fine you can do it with whatever you have next is the bushing the outer tube bushing so I'm going to clean it up inspect it just a little bit now it feels just a little bit gritty and that tells me how my guess was correct that it's mud that's what knocked out the seal guess I'm what got past the seal so I'm going to take the Scotch boy and I'm just gonna lightly go around on the inside of this bushing my guys quite often and inspect the wrong side this part means almost nothing you're inspecting the teflon coating on the inside and it just needs to be fairly smooth to the touch and make sure it's all on there quite often I'll start peeling up on the edges this one's in good shape I'm going to take the seal pull it off now this goes on do the same thing here inspect the inner tube bushing remove the camera here so let me check and see if you guys can see yep I think you can so it feels good it's not gritty feeling this one is at the bottom of where the oil is held so it's always going to click way more junk in it I want to up to the very top and it feels good on the inside you know it looks a little odd you might think it needs replaced but it does not but I do recommend it to infielder seals you should order bushings you should have them on hand because once you're in there you find a problem though if you find a bad bushing well then you got to call us up again and get them on the way so now you've really delayed your project at that point you might even kind of forget how it goes back together so from here I'm just gonna wipe out I'm gonna wipe out the inside of this and I'm gonna look down through here sight down through there and I should look nice and shiny if it doesn't get out some spray cleaner like a contact cleaner and clean it out so from here it's ready to go back together and let me see where my is so we sell co-drivers this is a really old one we don't have these anymore but we do have a fancier version I don't know what they cost I'm going to say thirty bucks or something what I do is I tap on that washer first to make sure that the bushing is really in position correctly because it fits a little bit cockeyed and then you go to drive in the seal the problem gets compounded so you can tell by that sound that it's going in all the way I'm gonna slide the seal down and I'm gonna drive it down and tell by the sound again the seal is bottomed you don't need to just beat the hell out of it now it's time to put circlip back in for that you're going to need your screwdriver and you're just gonna need to pop it in until you hear its I heard it snap in there then what I do is I push on one end and see if I can rotate it around that tells me it's in the groove on this end you can use the co-driver again to drive it in quite often you can put it in by hand with let me use the co-driver here that's all there is to it you gotta be careful though if you use the co-driver you might want to take and pop this spring off your here first and push it up here then drive in the seal then put the spring back on I actually damage the spring just a little bit but not a big deal okay seals in yeah let me adjust this a little bit for you sorry guys like I said I'm doing this by myself and the best I can here just to help you out this is my own bike I just want to knock out a seal top doing this video would it be helpful to some of you guys and have the same model fork on your bike so at this point I'm going to collapse the fork all the way down like that I'll wipe off some this oil that's on here and I'll just remove this guard as well now it's time to put the cartridge back in so this cartridge was rebuilt recently so I'm not going to do that again I'm just going to put it back in put it back up in here to raise this up a little bit okay I pushed it in until it actually pushed the bolt up the back here a little bit sign should be fully bottom I'm going to tighten that bolt okay cartridges in the bolts tightened down now it's ready for fluid so I've already measured out the oil quantity that I want for this fork it's a 180 cc's of the factory calls for for weight but WPS the only first only a company that makes that and it's very expensive and it's kind of ridiculous that if the difference between four and five weight is almost nothing I don't know why they did that but anyhow this is five weight I'm using the Maxima 85 150 which is a five and then you cannot use a vacuum device pull out the excess oil like you do on an open chamber fork you know you don't use this type of a tool you just measure it out and pour it in the outer chamber so from here I'm going to go down to the fork and you know this Wiggles around that's totally normal and you just carefully pour the oil in here if they can get around here a little bit I always like to let it run out until it starts dripping and then I stopped there use whatever method you want as long as you do it the same way every time then from there you just pull the outer tube up to the fork cap and then you tighten down the fork cap I want you to do is get it towards the whole ring is engaged so it doesn't leak now you can put it back up here in the soft jaws and tighten the cap and this does not have to be really tight you should not crank on it you're it's an aluminum cap and aluminum tube so similar metals if you can really crank on it you might never get it apart so I just hit it just a little bit now it's ready to go back on the bike that's really all there is to changing the the sealing this you would use a similar procedure if you just want to change the oil only you wouldn't take the cartridge out and the other side you also remove the cartridge it's a a little bit different looking cartridge so it's the same theory take the cap off take the nut off the bottom pull out the cartridge BAM it's ready to take apart to change the seal so the seal I mean this trying to do a video and do this the same time really slows down the project I could have done this in about five minutes and I had not been taking a video or making a video excuse me now this one here you can see this wearing has got quite a bit of wear it's not totally ready to replace yet but you want to keep an eye on these don't let it get it down to where it's rubbing into aluminum body that's what it's there for is to prevent that and these are cheap they're just in a little groove you pop them out of there and slide them up and get them off oh now you know Forks don't require that much maintenance I don't ever change for fluid about every 40 hours I take the forks apart change the seals change the fluid completely clean the internals and call it good I mean change the fluid if you want it's just not my way of doing it to me it's it's a lot of hassle when I can get just a little bit farther and have a really nice rebuilt fork that feels a lot better I'll post the parts at the at the bottom of this video right below the video in the description area I'll post links to the parts and please join our Slavens racing youtube channel and join our email list so you can get get our videos and other product information every week and it's all for now

Channel: Slavens Racing

Views: 12,174

Rating: 4.9726028 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie, WP AER forks, Wp AER fork seal change, WP fork seal change, KTM 250XC forks, KTM 300XC forks, KTM 350XCF forks, KTM 450XCF forks, KTM SXF forks, KTM fork seal change, Slavens Racing

Id: es_MvJWFczA

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019