Wedg1e
They call me Mr. Bodge-angles
- Messages
- 7,756
- Location
- Teesside, England
So I had one of these...
and one of these that I really wanted to be on there ^^ in place of the original spring...
but bike suspension units don't exactly fall apart so I made this...
An offcut of 100 x 100 x 4mm box, a bit of half-inch plate 'half-inched' from a pile of scrap at a certain Navy base
, two lengths of M12 studding and an assortment of nuts and washers. Oh, and a buckshee bottle jack from my dad's collection.
Insert unit into jig, odd length of alloy strip to protect the finish on the lower mount, jack up...
until the spring compresses a short way and the damper starts to protrude through the top plate. This where the 45 degree chamfer around the hole comes in, it lets you get a tool in to release the spring clip that retains the spring preload unit (the silver bit with the hydraulic line):
With the clip released you lower the jack so the spring tension starts to push the preload unit off. Remove the unit from the jig and slide the preload unit off the damper:
Spring off, clean up the damper, slip the new spring on, slide the preload unit back into place...
then reinstall to jig and recompress the spring:
Spring clip back into its groove, release the jig and hey presto!
The new spring is a rising-rate type to beef up the back end when there's a fat b^$+4)d on board.
The 1/2" plate was butchered from a larger piece using the plasma; it's only claimed to be good for a 10mm severance cut so it took a good few passes to get it to size. It's not what you'd call a precision cut piece The 50mm hole was drillled and bored in the lathe - it's nice steel, the swarf was beautiful .
and one of these that I really wanted to be on there ^^ in place of the original spring...
but bike suspension units don't exactly fall apart so I made this...
An offcut of 100 x 100 x 4mm box, a bit of half-inch plate 'half-inched' from a pile of scrap at a certain Navy base
, two lengths of M12 studding and an assortment of nuts and washers. Oh, and a buckshee bottle jack from my dad's collection.Insert unit into jig, odd length of alloy strip to protect the finish on the lower mount, jack up...
until the spring compresses a short way and the damper starts to protrude through the top plate. This where the 45 degree chamfer around the hole comes in, it lets you get a tool in to release the spring clip that retains the spring preload unit (the silver bit with the hydraulic line):
With the clip released you lower the jack so the spring tension starts to push the preload unit off. Remove the unit from the jig and slide the preload unit off the damper:
Spring off, clean up the damper, slip the new spring on, slide the preload unit back into place...
then reinstall to jig and recompress the spring:
Spring clip back into its groove, release the jig and hey presto!
The new spring is a rising-rate type to beef up the back end when there's a fat b^$+4)d on board.
The 1/2" plate was butchered from a larger piece using the plasma; it's only claimed to be good for a 10mm severance cut so it took a good few passes to get it to size. It's not what you'd call a precision cut piece
The 50mm hole was drillled and bored in the lathe - it's nice steel, the swarf was beautiful .
- that's a 1300 Honda Pan European.
