Forks modification advice

[tommyardin]

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Tommyyardin did you use a drill press to drill the holes or do it freehand? To be clear for the first/lowest 10mm hole you filed down the bottom of the 5mm hole by 3mm and started to drill the 10mm holes from there? Is it possible to measure the 3mm and use a centre punch to start the drilling or would this not work?
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Firstly in answer to the question about the centre punch, I think the it is very possible, quicker and could be more accurate, but I would go tap, look, tap look, tap look rather than wallop and possibly put a dent or distort the damper rod.
Start with a smaller pilot drill, say a 3mm and slowly get bigger.
I.E.: 3mm, 5mm, 6mm, 8mm, 9mm then 10mm, starting with the big drill will be really hard work and will take longer than going the multi drill route and certainly less accurate big drills can chunter and slip around until they take a bite.
I bought a set of drills from Lidle, but did not hold out much hope for them but to be honest but they are fantastic drills, much better than the De Walt set I had previously. Anyway what I am saying have a set of new or really sharp drill set handy as the damper rods are quite tough stuff.

I held my Damper rods in a carpenters wooden jawed vice and made sure it was nipped up really tight with the original oil hole top centre and went up through the drill sizes on one pair of holes at a time.

A useful tip:
After drilling out the first pair to 10mm run a piece of insulation tape around the damper rod with one edge touching the very top of the newly drilled hole, my insulation tape was exactly 15mm the distance needed between pairs of holes, it then shows you exactly where the bottom edge (not the centre) of the second pair of holes go. Make sure there is no swarf or jagged edges on the inside of the hole that could break off and possibly damage your emulator valves.
Good luck with the mod and I look forward to your thoughts on the finished results.

I started with a lighter Silkolean fork oil and fine tuned it as required by drawing thin oil out of the fork leg with a large medical syringe and a length off fish tank air pump tube, the syringe had calibration marks along its length and adding 30 grade fork oil this method gave me accuracy when drawing out the oil and also enabled me to put the exact same amount of heavier oil back, Mixing the oils to suit you our weight and riding style allows you to get between the 'off the shelf grades' my finished oil mix worked out at 17 or 18 grade, I started off with 10 grade, if I were ever to do this mod again I would start with 15 grade.

I used the YSS emulators from Wemmoto (not sure that is spelt right) and set my emulators 2.5 turns in from initial spring contact, with the slightly thickened fork oil this worked out perfect for me I am/was about 95 kilos fully garbed up with all my riding kit on. Lost a bit of weight (5 or 6 kilos) since then but bike suspension  still feels right.
I used the Suzuki SV650 8.5 N/mm Linears by Ohlin, they are just a tad shorter than the original springs but adding the emulators into the stack more than makes up for that, infact I had to remove/cut about 5mm from the top spring spacers. You can always add large penny washers to the top of that spacer if you want to add more pre-load, but make sure the original solid spacer disk is on the top of the washer pile for the preload adjuster to bear down on (adjuster screw only applies to later models)
Hope this is helpful.[/size]
[size=1em]Tom  [/size]