Then I will continue
Anyways, I'm working on the forks as we speak. I recently bought my third set of forks for this bike. I just couldn't find any that haven't been mangled up with a pipe wrench. With the forks coming of a MX bike it's really hard find nice ones. It's easier to get donor forks from a street supermoto like a KTM 690 SMC.
Below you can see how they started out. They are 47mm Showa forks from a Honda CRF. You can also see the finished rims. I will get to that later on.
For now I'm using OEM CRF triples. Maybe later I will have a custom set machined but for now the bike has been expensive enough
To make them fit I had a custom stem turned with 2 30x47x12mm tapered roller bearings. There is also a 45x30x2mm spacer under the lower bearing.
Technical drawing I made for the stem. After test fitting I concluded that the 16,5mm measurement on the top thread would be better if it was 14mm. I stil have to commission someone to machine it down 2.5mm.
The forks mounted on the bike. They are already lowered in this picture.
I wanted them to be black so I had them reanodised which was a lot of work.
First I had them deanodised:
Here you can see the pitting from rocks and just regular MX use:
To get a good result you have to sand and polish the fork tube. You pretty much need a lathe to do the sanding but I don't have a metal lathe and they are very expensive. As a solution I bought a wood lathe for €50 and 3D printed two adapters on my Ultimaker Original.
During the sanding and polishing:
The different stages. The ones on the left are finished. The final finish is 800 grit wet. Emery cloth works best. As you can see I also did my second set of forks.
So the final result can be seen here.
Currently in the progress on rebuilding the internals with new shim stacks suited for supermoto. The forks have also been lowered internally. I will get more in detail when I finish rebuilding the forks.
The shim stack will be identical to this setup. I found it on a supermoto forum and some guy running this setup on a supermoto converted XR650R (Which will be similar in weight as my bike) was pretty happy with the setup. As I don't really know anything about suspension setup and having them done professionally being really expensive I'm going to take this setup as a base setup. I just had to buy 8 6x30x0.10 shims to get the correct stack as I stole some from one of the other forks I had. I sold that fork later on as a 'parts' fork.
Pretty cool video about shock settings:
In the next post I will probably have the forks finished up.