Tech Tips: How to Change Your Fork Springs

you hey this is Michael Lindsey from vital MX we're down shopper on Mars Sports today you know this is a personal problem of being the small guy out there but when you get on a 450 they're typically over sprung for me or maybe you're the opposite problem and you're a little big for 250th either way one of the cheapest ways to make your bike better is just to swap out those Springs we've already shown you how to do a shock so today we're going to show you the easy way to do a fork without fully tearing it apart so anybody who doesn't have any experience tearing down suspension probably thinks that when you have to change a fork spring it requires draining oil and really getting down into it anybody that's played around Fork though knows there's a quick and easier way about it and that's what we're gonna show you today whether you just want to do in your garage or even at the track because you're testing there is a way to pop this apart and keep all the oil inside of the tubing so for that the tools are fairly simple you'll need an assortment of end wrenches and sockets a flat blade screwdriver to pop the dust seal and retaining clip the real special item you'll need you might be able to get away without a rebound rod retaining clip which will show you where that comes in but you will need a set of seal drivers appropriate for your tube sizing first step I recommend is backing out your rebound clicker all the way make sure that you already know what your setting is so you can return this lighter I know that this Fork is 20 clicks out I'm just gonna go ahead and back it all the way off press the way now the goal is to get the rebound bolt out of the lug now some of these might be tight enough you might have to put your fork in a vise we've already played with ours and we know that it's loose enough that I can get away with just having my socket here you can either use an axle or say another socket wrench to hold the axle in place as I said we are a kind of broke ours loose as you can see we're actually doing this in a pretty simple situation we don't really have a fancy work desk or a suspension bin or anything like that that's realistically how easy it is to change the fork spring that you don't need the special area to get away with this once this is loosened up all the way we can now compress the lug and see the rebound rod you can see there's a nut here the countersinks against the bolt we need to break loose now if this was a separate function spring fork or a fork with a lot more spring ray this compression would be kind of hard you'd probably have a proper lock here that would hold the fork from coming back up in this case it's not that bad of a spring rate we're able to just use the end wrench to lock it I want to make sure not to make that too much of a jerking motion where we have our end wrench being the only thing holding our fork compressed if you do it too quickly you might pop the whole thing off and pinch your finger or send some tools flying once you have your rebound bolt free you want to pull up draw it out so you don't lose it now that we have our rebound bolt free from the rod the only thing really holding the lower tube together is the seals and the retaining clip in between the lower and upper tube in this location once we're able to get those out we're gonna be able to take the lower tube off with keeping all the oil inside the upper tube because the cap still on that means we're going to be able to pull the fork spring out swap it put another one in and put this all back together so now we're going to show you how to get the seal in the retaining clip out this is where your flat blade screwdriver is going to come in handy you're gonna find the edge of the dust seal versus a lower tube here and you're just going to pry on it just a little bit and try to start getting your screwdriver under the lip being that this is a fairly nicer set of forks I'm trying to be easy on this and not care if the coating too much so time until the dust seal is free as we can see inside now there's actually a retaining clip along the inside Ridge of this upper tube that's what's holding oil sealing this is very easy to take out take a flat blade screwdriver and there will be little lips on the ring for you to grab and pry against just like that our retaining clip is free so now the only thing holding this together really is the oil seal so we're going to slide our lower tube up until the bushing has bottomed out against our oil seal and we're going to give a little tap there you go as you can see we now have access to the fork spring and pretty much all the oil is still inside you will get a little drip or two something to do ahead of time if you know you're gonna change this and you have time having the fork in the upside down position leaned up against a bench for a while will allow any little bit of oil that's left in the lower tubing on the spring to drain to this location and then as long as you keep it in this inversion while working on it all the oils stay down there and there won't be as much free to drip off so in this case we're actually not going to swap our spring rate but to show you how simple it is spring off and you could slide a new one right in now it's as simple as putting the tubes back in now this right here you could do some work around using screwdrivers or some way to try to press the oil seal back in personally that's pretty wonky even by my standards so I really prefer using an actual seal driver to do this job properly because this is a pretty important aspect of the fork this is what keeps the oil retain and inside so if you manage to gouge the tube trying to use a different object or mess up oil seal you're really just gonna cause yourself a lot more pain and suffering for both your wallet and time working on the fork so now we're just gonna take our seal driver here place it around the tube and start using it to slowly press our oil seal into place for the most part you should feel and hear when the oil seal has bottomed out like it has right now the other easy way to be able to tell is to look down inside and see if the channel that you're gonna put the lock greenback lock ring back into is usable which in this case it is so we're going to take our lock ring slide it back in sometimes you can get lucky and just do that with your fingers sometimes like this I have to take a screwdriver and just give it a little extra tap in really important part here is to take a second to go all the way around the ring and make sure it's completely seated into the groove as I said this is what's holding the oil seal in so once we've done that ours is completely in the groove we can just take our dust seal down sometimes like now you can just pull that down with your fingers you might have to take a screwdriver and push it down slowly lip by lip but in this case it's sealed right up so the last thing left is to put our rebound bolt back not just in the lug you got to make sure now of course that you get it attached to the rebound rod and get that tighten down correctly so we'll show you that next so the needle that we're inserting to our rebound rod on the schola is d shaped as you can see it's keyed you want to make sure when you insert it that you turn it until it seats into its key position if it's not as you might just saw before I turned it it will be exposed above the threads when you turn it into the correct spot it'll slip down inside like the one we have now so our next goal is to get a rebound nut threaded back onto the rod it's the case we're gonna use our end wrench there to lock in place once again the needle we're going to insert this into is key shaped and so is the adjuster here so you want to make sure you get that in correctly if not you can some people will get it on the key wrong start to tighten this down and they can twist and messed up in the end of that key that's in there and damage it so now we're gonna tighten this down on to the rod until it bottoms out once it bottoms out and begins to turn the entire rod switch our end wrench and put it back onto the retaining nut and tighten these two together to keep the rebound rod bolt firmly attached to the rod want that once that is done you can compress the fork leg move the end wrench let the fork extend and now the last thing is left is to tighten down the rebound bolt into the lug firmly some people have taken impact guns to this that is not a very good idea especially if you want anybody to be able to get these apart later like a suspension guy will probably rip you a new one if you do that as I said you can use either an axle or another socket wrench something to hold in our lug here to tie that up or you could put your fork into a vise and clamp it to give you a little more of a controlled surface when you're tightening down the rebound bolt now that we're done the last is to just reset your rebound adjuster to clicker position that you had it in before you took this fork apart so this case we're going to bottom out our adjuster clockwise and then count back to our position and just like that I changed the fork spring we didn't even have to drain the oil if you want to learn more about suspension check out some of our other tech tips videos we go through how to adjust them how to remove them from the bike and for any of other of our bike reviews or if you want to learn more about the industry or anything else jump on vital MX com

Channel: Vital MX

Views: 55,104

Rating: 4.9009523 out of 5

Keywords: Vital MX, VitalMX.com, motocross, supercross, dirt bikes, mx, motorcycle, Forks, Spring, Fork Springs, Spring Change, How-To, Tech Tips, Chaparral, Chaparral Motorsports

Id: hc5TTiCvops

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018