What are these?
Would that be the "oil lock piece" #11 from this diagram? Bikebandit shows it in their diagrams but it's not listed as a part for order or purchase. Could it be discontinued?
Here's my situation. Months ago I disassembled some very messy forks from a donor bike and had the lowers powder coated, the stanchion tubes (if I'm saying that correctly, or uppers, were toast, too pitted and rusty to salvage, which was no problem since I had a working set of forks on my bike. I finally got around to switching the lowers yesterday. It was quite a job since it's only the 3rd time I've ever messed with fork seals, and no air tools. Many hours later I got it all buttoned up and took it for a 20 mile test ride.
This morning, feeling pretty good about my success, I was cleaning up and wiping down the extra lowers for storage. Looking inside, now that they were reasonably clean, there seemed to be something down there -- the aluminum pieces pictured above. It took a pretty good whack upside down on the work bench to free them, but out they came. Uh-oh. I never noticed if the new powdered legs had these installed, and the service manual (downloaded copy) never mentioned them during the rebuild process. Arghhh.
So, the rebuilt forks seemed to operate fine on the test ride. And there's no perceptible oil leaking from the bottom of the lowers. I think I know the unfortunate answer to my question -- do I really need to pull these jokers apart again just to see if this piece is in my new lowers?
I guess why I'm asking is in the unlikely chance that you guys would be able to tell me: there's no way your forks would seal without that piece, so they must be in there. Or, perhaps that's a discontinued piece that does nothing, so don't sweat it, etc.. Again, it looks like another day of "learning" about forks in the shop for me, unless you guys can help me out of it
Thoughts? (Besides the obvious about my mechanical ineptitude
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