Spring Compression Ingenuity

As some of you may already know, I've been in Arizona on an extended vacation this winter and have had the opportunity to do some riding... I met one of our members (ob1jeeper) out here and we have been on several rides together. Shortly after our first ride, I blew the left fork seal on my FZR. Steve was gracious enough to not only offer the use of his garage for the repairs, but also helped with the job. Many thanks go out to Steve. He's a great guy and we had a lot of fun.

During the repair, it became obvious that we were going to need a spring compression tool. I didn't bother to check with the bike shop to see how much one would cost, I just assumed it was going to be expensive. And, to be honest, I didn't want to pay for a tool that I was only likely going to use one time. So, being an engineer by trade, Steve came up with this contraption. It worked great, and was very simple to make...










Here was our method of holding the bike up to get the job done. It saved a lot of work as we didn't have to remove the fork tubes from the triple tree.... (These are USD cartridge type forks)





And, here we are in the middle of the job. Yes, we did both fork tubes while we had it up....