Warren
2
Am I correct that you have to remove the forks to change the fork oil? I am not able to see a drain plug in the forks.
Add another thing to the list of maintenance hassles Honda gave us. I might try the mityvac angle since I have one and the fork oil should be fairly clean at this stage.No drain hole. You could use a mityvac to suck the oil out, but if you go that route you won't be getting things cleaned out very well, so it's probably best to just remove the forks.
Everything you say makes perfect sense. I have been toying with the idea of installing the Ricor Intiminator fork valves. One of the pluses is that all you have to do is drain the fork oil, remove the springs, drop in the valves and fill it back up with oil. It can all be done without removing the forks (other than the minor detail of draining the fork oil). The Race Tech gold valves on the other hand requires removing the forks to modify the fork tubes which is something I was trying to avoid. Looks like I might need to noodle on this a little more. Since my work shop is a parking lot I want to avoid major surgery when I can.No bike I have worked on that was made since the 1980s, has had fork oil drain holes. It seems to have gone out of fashion.
I have used the mityvac trick and not really felt it did a good job. Last time I did it, I bought an extra bottle of fork oil and used it to rinse the inside of the forks, and sucked that out as well. But I really should have taken the forks off. I just put it off because I find it a difficult job to do alone. The bike is suspended in some precarious way, and then it takes a lot of strength to yank the darn forks off, and I am not strong enough to hold both bike and forks and pull them apart - instead I have to pull on the forks with all my weight, and count on whatever mechanism is suspending the bike, to hold it. I'm always afraid of sending it all crashing down, perhaps on top of myself.
So I miss having the drain hole. OTOH, I suspect that the reason they don't have 'em any more, is because they don't get things much cleaner than the mityvac trick does. When I have taken the forks apart, a lot of the moss that grows inside of forks is stuck to the various parts, even after the oil is all drained. Disassembling and cleaning is better.
I have been toying with the idea of installing the Ricor Intiminator fork valves.
The NT hasn't racked up enough miles yet for a fork rebuild but in your experience, how did the bushings look (and at what mileage) when you dismantled your forks on the NT?...
In regards to changing fork oil - I do it every two years and my way involves total disassembly. After two years the crud that lives in the bottom of the slider is significant and what started out as 5 wt oil looks more like 10 wt! Doing it this way to time-consuming but it saves the oil seals plus the fork bushings.