Le Mans Mk 1 Fork oil

I’ve also had a thought about a couple of serious gotchas now you’re replacing the dampers and springs.
Firstly, there’s another sealing washer under the head of the bolt that goes up through the bottom of the slider to secure the damper. Replace it, the last thing you need is an oil weep around the wheel spindle. I think I used copper brake washers, but the originals are aluminium.
Secondly, and this is really important. When you put the assembled cartridge into the fork leg, there’s a cheap looking pressed tin seating cup right at the bottom. This has a little tang sticking out of one side. You’re supposed to insert the assembly and gently rotate the whole thing until the tang seats into a slot inside the bottom of the leg. The slot is actually the drilling for the drain plug. It’ll feel like it’s properly seated by dropping a couple of millimetres. Then you can tighten it up.
If your forks have already been apart before, then it’s quite likely you’ll have some trouble. There’s a good chance this wasn’t done properly last time and the cup was tightened down in the wrong orientation with the tang now getting bent up and the cup being jammed tight in the bottom of the fork leg. Getting it out is tricky and generally involves messing around with hammer and pin punch through the bottom bolt hole to try to catch a corner and force it back out. Replacement cups are rarely available and so you’ll probably need to try to reclaim what’s left of the tang to reuse the damaged cup.
Yes, we’ve all done this.

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Depending on the condition of the seals and dust covers. The alternative outcome is blowing out the seal if you hit a big enough bump or pothole :face_with_head_bandage:

They were never designed as an air-assist fork. I ended up fitting FAC dampers with air assist. No problems since.

Your switches look in excellent condition look after them, see here for a set on eBay that are in terribly bad worn condition and one side the wires have been cut off and the other side has broken buttons, but they still want £173.90 for them!

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Thank you everyone for all the feedback. Very much appreciated.

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