What the Fork?

Ok, so I thought I was going to work on the frame next. Well, I was trying to order some parts to rebuild the forks with, but unfortunately the guys at Honda weren't entirely sure which parts I would need. They recommended that I break down the forks to see what they had. The old exploded images of parts aren't entirely clear, so they wanted to be sure they were getting me the right stuff.

I felt inspired last night, so I went to work on the forks for the bike. Well, one of the forks anyway. What I've found out so far is that it takes longer to degrease / clean up what I'm working on that it does to actually do what I set out to do.

For example, I had hoped to take both forks apart so that I knew exactly what to order. Well, I didn't get either fork apart. I spent the whole evening just cleaning up one fork.

Here's what I started with:


And here is what I ended up with after much scrubbing, brushing, power drill work, etc:



It's not factory or anything, but it looks a lot better than it did when I started. The hardest part was getting the nasty inspection sticker off. It had been on there since 05. Underneath the inspection sticker were all sorts of dings from years of abuse. When I get this on the road, I'll add one of those cool flaps of metal to put the stickers on.

I did manage to drain the remaining fork oil out (there wasn't much left). I'll get to use my handy-dandy ring-clip pliers to take these bad boys apart.