RockShox Fork Full Rebuild Tutorial | How to Service Upper and Lower Legs Every Detail! DIY EASY

welcome back to the shop your wrench warriors today we're going to do a complete service on this rockshox reba with the motion control damper system we're going to go through every single detail to make sure that you get your fork to run as smooth as new actually we're going to get your fork to run smoother than new and if you haven't removed your fork yet check out the previous video where we did removal installation along with the the headset bearing service all right what you're gonna need for this project is you're gonna need a basic socket set i did a review of this exact one in a previous video you can check that out you need a 24 millimeter socket a wood dowel a rubber mallet a set of allen keys and metric snap ring pliers a bicycle torque wrench this is a venzo i did a review of this in an earlier video check that out some mechanics picks you need the fluid this is maxima plush five weight you need something that measures fluid down to the milliliter some shram butter for your seals you need to rock shop lower oil zero to 30 weight need the tool to remove schrader valve cores you're gonna need the seal set for your particular set of forks you're gonna need some paper towels some rubber gloves and some safety glasses if you're into the whole safety thing isopropyl alcohol and a drain pan optionally you're going to want a bicycle mechanism clamp now this isn't 100 mandatory it's going to make your life a lot easier this is a venzo and i did a review of it in a previous video go check that out all right before we spend too much time on this project we're going to want to check the condition of the bushings in our lowers these are your lowers and these are your uppers if the bushings are bad you need to replace your entire lower assembly and they're they're hard to get for these older models so if that's the case you're better off buying new or buying a better used set but let's go ahead and check and see if ours are any good first thing you're going to do is you're going to want to pump the shock at least five times one that gets the fluid flowing around you're going to want to push it firmly into the table hold firmly on the steering tube grab your crown and try to rock the lowers on the uppers okay my table's wiggling but i'm not feeling any motion in here at all and if you did have loose bushings you'd know it you'd feel clunking in your hand as you held this right here you'd see it you'd feel it and you'd hear it i have none of those problems so this thing is a good candidate for rebuild and if you do end up having to replace yours with new go ahead and watch my video it's called 2021 pike unboxing and install i go through the entire process of putting a new shock on your bike from fitting to cutting down the steering tube everything so check that out all right let's go forward with rebuilding this one let's chuck it up in the bike mechanics clamp and we're going to want to relieve the air pressure if yours has air pressure up here and on the bottom this is called your negative air pressure you need to do the negative first so let's turn it upside down all right down here is our cap for our negative air pressure let's remove that and we'll depress the schrader valve just flip it up right side up we'll do our positive air pressure all right you want to let the air out before taking these apart or you can get hurt on the bottom of the shock here we're going to pull out the rebound adjustment knob you just pull it straight out now down in there we have a five millimeter allen key we're gonna use this ratchet to get down in there and we're just gonna loosen that about three turns one two actually about two turns now the other side i have a hollow leg so my schrader valve uses a 10 millimeter with a deep well you go down in there and just turn that around two times now that we have both sides turned out two turns we're gonna take our five millimeter allen key socket and we're gonna stick it down inside that bolt hold our lowers firmly and give it a couple wraps with the rubber mallet then you wanna take a very large 10-millimeter deep well with a hole in it big enough to clear the threads on the schrader valve or you'll goof up the threads i've already done it once so that one clears the threads we're going to hold the lowers and give it two wax now that we've broken those free we want to completely remove the hardware be sure to hold your uppers so they don't fall out the bottom onto the ground i'm going to turn these sideways for just a second all right now we've got our drain pan underneath our shocks let's go ahead and drain them okay if you're not getting any fluid that means we didn't break the seal on the legs so we have to do is turn it around you're going to take your fasteners and you're going to turn them in a couple of turns and we're going to give it a few more wraps sometimes rubber just doesn't have that shock you need to break a press fit so you just turn it into a bottoms out a little bit nice and finger loose and then turn it out one turn tap it check it again back it off a little bit you don't want to be hammering on one thread okay that finally did it i think okay now we're getting oil draining out of these so there comes the lowers or off the uppers we're gonna set our lowers down in the pan to drain a little bit so just to recap what we did there was we loosened both fasteners and then we'd loosen them a couple turns then we tapped them in loose them a little bit more tap them in until they finally broke free they're press fitted in the bottom of these lowers here so you got to just tap them up out of there using the fasteners once they're both loose take the fasteners completely out turn the shock upright let it drain for a little bit and then pull the lowers off there wasn't very much oil in it hardly anything really there's only five cc's of oil in each side and that's called the oil bath and it lubricates these sanctions or stations and as it as it coats it with oil that coat that oil will mix with dirt and then take off so that oil does get consumed so about every 25 hours you want to pull those lowers and add your oil bath or what will happen is you'll run dry like this one is and so you start to get stiction and once you get stiction it starts to wear out the bearings and or the bushings in the lowers then you need new lowers or you need new shocks in the next segment we'll be removing these seals but a quick word of caution is hold on to the tube you're working on keep it off the table and pull out the seal that you're working on don't allow the fork to bend against the table or twist because without the uppers in these things are actually not that strong and you can bend them and you're going to want to use a dull big flat head screwdriver with a round shaft you're going to push it under the seal but not so far that you're grabbing the aluminum okay another seal's out poor foam ring out this right here is your bushing down deeper in there is another one you can see it same thing on this side all right now we need to clean down inside our lowers here so we'll cut off a piece of an old t-shirt you got to use a mountain dew shirt if you're working on a mountain bike [Music] i'm going to take a wooden dowel this one looks like it's about 3 8 inch and i'm going to zip tie this to the end of it pull it very very tight there's pliers to help me soak this with alcohol now it's clean down inside there i've tried to use paper towels down in here but they come apart and little bits end up caught all over the place so use an old t-shirt this rag still looks pretty clean so i'm just going to use it for the other side as well now i'm just going to blow it out to get any debris out everything looks really clean and no debris now go ahead and open up your seal kit and take out the foam rings place them in a container and we're going to use our lower oil in this case i'm using zero w30 rockshox oil we're going to want to pre-soak these foam rings the rings have been soaking for a few minutes they look pretty saturated let's grab our seals these are called the dust wipers these guys here get those two out take your oil soaked foam ring place it in there nicely make sure it's square it doesn't twist or anything then we're going to take our oil seal and dust wiper put it on there nice and square to help you get the dust wipe and oil seal seated you can use a one and a half inch piece of pvc we're gonna carefully make sure not to crush the lip of our seal here now we're gonna work it slowly squarely into the hole okay this one went in this side went in a lot sooner so i'm going to carefully pull that back out once we've got it started fairly square we're going to use our pipe to help push it in there give you guys another angle so i'm going to push on this side square it up you don't want to get the seated all the way around evenly you don't want that coming up on the trail and having dirt get down inside your lowers it's a good idea to have the free end that you're not working on sticking up off the table so you can't you know get any leverage and bend your crown here now that we got our dust seals installed we're going to take a little bit of shram butter add a little bit of that to our seals now these were new seals so they came with a little bit installed it's going to add a little bit more this is going to stop with stiction on the stanchions keep your ride a little smoother okay our lowers are all serviced if you're just trying to do a lower service you can skip to the part where i'm reinstalling the lowers but i'm going to put these aside and we're going to service the uppers okay before we go any further with the disassembly of the uppers we need to get rid of any dirt that could find its way down into the mechanism so let's take some sand air use a rag let's remove our little ring here clean that off let's clean our stanchions we'll use a brush to get down in there oh that's working pretty good i'm just trying to get as much dirt away from everything before we go opening it up okay before we open up the top of the air cap here let's uh double check our schrader valves are empty a little bit of air came out check our bottom one this is double air spring a little bit of air came out there too now let's take our 24 millimeter socket start moving our air cap don't let it slip like i just did you don't want to mar your cap okay we'll set our air cap aside next we're going to depress the schrader valve and we're going to push this up as far as we can okay now we're going to want to flip the fork upside down okay here's the snap ring we need we need to remove in order to get this other base plate out of the way we're going to do is i'm going to take a 15-millimeter socket push down on the center of that and then remove the snap ring depressing the center plate with the socket unlocks the snap ring the snap ring removed i'm just going to go ahead and pull our air spring out there's our air spring assembly now your air spring side should be completely hollow okay let's take a new bite of the fork and we're gonna buy it on the steerer tube now okay now we're gonna take our t-shirt on a stick got a new piece of shirt on there put some alcohol on it and we're going to clean the inside of the air chamber let's turn our patch inside out i'm gonna go two layers to make a little bit thicker and push it down again that looks spotless let's flip it over and check the other side okay i'm going to pay special attention to the inside of where the air cap was to get that dirt out of there so it doesn't find its way back down inside there i'm going to clean this threaded area spotless down there it's a mirror got our air spring out let's take this part here's our base plate here's our wavy washer here's our support ring which was this negative piston top out bumper this looks like a spacer this is called our negative piston we're gonna slide that off of there then the rest of this i don't believe comes apart let's clean it up let's start cleaning up the individual pieces be careful with these washers they're fragile okay now we need to change the o-rings in the negative air piston and on the positive air piston we'll use our picks be super careful not to scratch any of your pistons you want to dig into that o-ring make sure you're only getting the o-ring so there's no confusion let's just change that now let's find the matching o-ring this one looks like it here let's double check same thickness same diameter let's put the new one over here take the old one and set it on the table put all our other o-rings in the bag okay we'll put our new one on looks nice now we need to get the o-rings off our negative air piston again be careful not to scratch this now these have an internal o-ring too so we're going to carefully remove that one let's play our kit match those up this one is this one put our new ones on the bottom are old ones on the top it's pretty thick that looks good slightly smaller diameter but i may have stretched the old one out quite a bit put a new one over here take our old ones put them on the table let's put a little grease on these o-rings this one's internal so it'll be a little harder to lube up later put that back inside our negative air piston which looks like it's going to be a real hoot okay that's installed squeeze this one up that one on now we're going to do is apply some grease to our air shaft you may want to be wearing gloves for this i should be wearing gloves i forgot to put them on all right put everything back on in the same order that we removed it just be nice and gentle you don't want to hurt your o-rings that one's pretty much cleaned all the over all the grease off of there okay assembly is put back together if your paper towel starts to get too dirty and contaminated swap it out you don't want any of that stuff making it into the new system okay let's uh grease up all our o-rings real generously okay our air shafts all put together and ready to be installed okay we got to change the o-ring on the air cap let's clean that up you don't want dirt going into any of your assemblies as things move it'll score them up and they'll leak and your shocks will be done okay let's match up its ovary okay it's that one these o-rings have a cast mark on them a cast line you can barely see it see if i can get you guys to focus it's just a small ridge that goes all the way around it make sure your o-ring's not twisted when you install it grease up this o-ring so it doesn't get cut when we install it guys i wanted to mention one thing to you real quick if you want to increase the travel of your fork go ahead and take out take out this spacer right here this is a 10 millimeter spacer so if i were to take that out it increased the travel of the fork by 10 millimeters conversely if you want to reduce your travel add these okay next thing we want to do is you want to apply grease down inside here go about two and a half three inches down there just apply an even coat of grease all the way through here let's grease that edge and now we're going to take our air piston assembly make sure our rings are in place here we're gonna work it down inside there nice and easy okay that's in now we're going to work our negative air piston in there that's in if you got it all assembled right this part this base should feel springy and it does so let's get our snap ring snap rings have a sharp side and a rounded side depending on how they're punched out so this would be the rounded side this would be the sharper side so put your sharper side towards your tool end and it'll be less likely to slip off your tool so rotate the whole assembly and we've got our air cap with this new o-ring and it's greased put that on nice and gentle we've got our torque wrench set on seven and a half newtons hold your socket down nice and flat against the nut so you don't mar it okay that's on we'll put our air cap on to keep dust out okay our air side service is done okay now let's start service on the damper side here's a 2.5 millimeter hex you're gonna remove your compression adjustment knob underneath that you're going to find a little leaf spring with detents and carefully sneak under that with a flat head just work your way nice and easy around it and take our 24 millimeter socket we got our cap loose so let's pull up on it place your oil pan underneath the fork here okay here's our motion control damper out of there let's invert the fork and drain the oil okay we'll let that sit like that okay now we're gonna push our rebound shaft down inside here hold the end of it we're gonna remove the snap ring and we're just going to pull the whole assembly right out the top now our damper side is completely empty and put some alcohol on some mountain dew patches and send them on down there and send them down one more time that looks spotless okay we have our motion control damper let's go ahead and change the o-rings on it be careful not to scratch any of the plastic or you'll get oil leaks okay so mash up your o-rings to the new one this one looks like it okay let's match up the top seal looks like it's this one here this one goes back in the bag i'm cleaning off the flats at the top here where dirt snuck under the adjustment knob so that stuff doesn't make its way into the system okay we're going to put a little bit of grease on the o-rings so when we put them in they don't get torn okay let's work on the rebound assembly take a little bit of alcohol let's clean the shaft off get rid of as much old oil as we can yeah let's change the o-rings on this this one has an internal and an external o-ring make sure you stab far enough into your o-ring so you're not slipping and scratching your piston and i'm pushing in directions with the hook that don't get the piston okay there's our large o-ring here's our small one let's find them in the kit okay that's obviously that one and there's only one large one left so that makes life a little easier and put the old ones on the table so i know they're the old ones grease up the new ones and stick that down inside there okay that one's installed let's grease this one up okay let's change out the glide ring here let's match that up take our old guy ring put on the table so no told okay let's put our seal head back on our rebound rod okay i'm going to put the seal head just a little ways from the end here about an inch and that's ready to be put back all right let's put the rebound rod back in its place so you need to pay attention there's a split in this glide ring you're going to put the smooth side in the shaft first at an angle so we're going to leave the split up we're going to angle it to get it down in there we're just going to rotate it nice and easy there it goes no force at all don't go crazy at all i'm just going to push our seal head in here we have some grease on our o-rings so we know they should be good okay there it goes okay our seal heads installed we'll wipe off our snap ring okay we'll take the sharp side and put that towards the pliers okay we'll rotate the snap ring a little bit make sure it's seated looks like it is now we'll pull our damp rod all the way out we'll rotate the whole assembly okay this part's super critical the amount of oil and the type of oil now here's that secret to making your fork better than new this maxima plush fluid this is what rockshox is using in their new forks now it's five weight it's very low stiction so your fork doesn't have that thing where it holds and then falls it just kind of floats it's nice anyways get some of this stuff and you're gonna need a way to measure it so i've got this little beaker here and it goes up to 100 milliliters but it's not going to be very accurate for smaller amounts if you look here i need 123 milliliters so i have this smaller syringe to get the smaller amounts so i'll measure 100 on this 20 on this and then i'll score it in three using this little syringe now if you're wondering how you figure out exactly what fork you have i'll leave a link in the description where you can enter your serial number and find out exactly what you got this is a reba rl and it's calling for 123 milliliters if you put too much your fork won't have as much travel and if you don't put enough you'll get some weird damping there goes 100 here's 20. okay here is three milliliters we're going to open this all the way by turning it counterclockwise till it stops it's already there i'm just going to place this down inside birdie grease the o-rings and everything let's turn it by hand a little bit make sure we don't cross thread it this one's also seven and a half newton meters okay that's on there to put a little leaf spring put your dimples down into the holes put our cap now this cap make sure you get full full travel because you can ride up on this crown right here and cause yourself not to get full travel so let's check perfect we're getting full travel with no interference let's just put our retaining screw in don't go crazy on that screw it's just in plastic now the top end of our fork is all put together if you have regular lowers now is the time to put them on and then you can add oil through the holes in the bottom here but i have hollow hollow leg forks so i have a slightly different procedure i'm going to add the oil first since the holes are hard to get to i'm going to add the oil first at an angle and then slip it onto the uppers but if you if you guys have the standard ones where the bolts right at the bottom or your rebound adjustments right at the bottom you don't have this hollow portion you're going to simply put them on turn them upside down and add your oil through those holes my forks are riva rls so if we look here we did our 123 milliliters already in our damper side but over here in our lower legs we need five milliliters of 15 weight oil this is the oil rock shocks recommends now in zero w30 so we're gonna put that in the legs just gonna set these down on the little crown we'll tilt them up a little bit with a water bottle to get a nice little angle i don't have a way to measure five milliliters so i'm gonna do three and then two on the syringe here let's go ahead and do three milliliters okay there goes two milliliters okay here goes three there's two milliliters okay now we have five milliliters in each leg just make sure our sanctions are clean one last time and put our sag ring back on just take a little bit of shram butter i'm just going to put it right here right where this hard edge is help those seals slide on holding our lowers horizontal just gonna put them on there nice and slow try not to scrape the insides so the goal here is not to fold the lips i want to just get them on there nice and straight okay both sides are started now i'm going to see i'm just going to check before i go pushing it up there make sure that my lips aren't folded in anywhere that side looks good this side looks good i'm gonna slide it up there okay we can tilt the fork up now that the top is sealed these two extra pieces in the kit probably went to a different model fork so we'll leave them in there and that leaves us with the crush washers so these things have little plastic seals called crush washers and you can reuse them but the kit comes with new ones so let's throw on some new ones when you're doing your lower leg service and you're just gonna you know clean them out and splash new oil you can just reuse those all right we're back to the beginning we just got to put our fasteners back down in there and torque them the venzo torque wrench kit i reviewed an earlier video even has the long five millimeter allen key you're gonna need on the damper side it's gonna be a five millimeter allen key with an extension just start it by hand make sure that we're not cross threaded on this side it's going to be a 10 millimeter socket and i'm using the half inch drive because the only thing big enough for the schrader valve to pass through the middle if you find that you're turning and turning push your lowers on a little further just going to jam that rod into the bottom of your lowers now we're starting to get somewhere okay the torque spec down here is also 7.3 fork is sealed up now okay at the back of the shock here we have some baseline numbers let's take a look at those life is about about a hundred and a little less pounds so it says our air should be 70 to 90 so let's use 80 and our negative error 70 to 90 so let's use 80. so 80 on top 80 on bottom [Music] there goes 80. okay put our air cap on the bottom let's not forget our rebound adjustment knob all right guys that concludes the service of these forks they're ready to be reinstalled after a quick double check of the fasteners this thing's ready to hit the trails again if you found this useful subscribe it really helped me out a lot and i'll see you guys back in the shop you

Channel: Herb-O-Matic

Views: 56,015

Keywords: Tool Review, How-To, How to, Howto, Repair, Rockshox, Rockshocks, Rock Shocks, Fix RockShox, Fix Rockshox, DIY Rockshox, Service Rockshox, Uppers Rockshox, Lowers Rockshox, Rockshox Reba, Rockshox Reba RL, Rockshox Motion Control Repair, Stiff Rockshox, Home Service of Rockshox, Rockshox tutorial, Rockshox Removal, Rockshox oil change

Id: uTzVhZ6_YAs

Length: 38min 24sec (2304 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021