Well, this was my very-very-very worst case of a service I tried & promised over the last weeks. It is a golden XC700 from Australia.
Brian is a very nice and friendly guy from Australia and wanted a full rebuild including decals for his older custom bike from the 1996 (Brian, can you add some infos about the bike, please??) with a mounted XC700.
He asked me to help and service it and I said – as I always did – “yes, no problem. I have all the spare parts I need and if a part is broken, I will change it also by using used spare parts”.
Be sure: I will keep my big mouth more shut and will look a bit more in detail in the future but anyway: I will continue doing my very best to get every user of such an older Marzocchi fork riding it again – as I did also with this one.
I was sent some pictures before I received the fork just for identifying, it looks not very well from the outside. But I did not expect, what I found in there during working on it …
When the fork arrived and I checked it I got my first surprises:
- the stanchion tubes had been completely stuck in the tubes – water had been inside and made the stanchions swell up and stuck
- only one side was moving a bit – only some mm (sounds wired)
- the chromed stanchion tubes had deadly marks of corrosion on the outside
- air caps where deadly corroded
- the damping adjuster in the bottom where corroded and
- all rings where corroded
O.k. What can we do to this deady injured patient? We need to sent it into deep koma and open his thorax to be able to examine his condition.
So I tried to dissassemble the patient … and I can tell you: It was the hardest one I ever had. I don’t have pictures about the tools – most heavily used a press and some liters or WD40 – but in the end I got it open and saw what we have here … and the whole damage.
After opening the tubes I found most of the Australian desert inside … what a mess!!
…
In the end I took some spare parts from my various boxes (lucky me 🙂 and built a complete new fork as I couldn’t use any of the parts again. So the only thing which can be reused is the fork crown. Brian got a complete new, 100% functional nice looking fork back. As he managed to buy XC700 sticker somewhere on the net he will have it as it’s best.
