Well, guys, my joy of owning a mint bike has been short lived. About a month ago, some kid decided all of a sudden to take a left turn, not looking if anybody was already overtaking. That somebody turned out to be me and... you can see the result below. Mind you that I was coming from the right side of the pic before ending up in the ditch.





Long story short, now I'm in the process of repairing the the bike. Since buying in in the first place drew a big hole in my finances, I'll try and do it by myself as much as possible.

Step #1 is changing the fork tubes, since both of them got bent. I got some new ones from wemoto, ~165EUR / piece, but now I wanted to ask if any of you has any experience on this. Do you know of any step by step / show & tell? are there any SF tools required? For instance, to service the fork in my old SuperTenere I had to fabricate a contraption to unscrew the damn inner bolt.

Much obliged for your help. I'll do my best to document all the stages of the repair, so others in similar situations may walk a less rugged road.

@Pepsi

The thought did cross my mind about 23.533.785 times.

BUT

2nd WR forks, from Yahama or KTM, are a rather scarce and I failed to find one that I could actually examine. Buying one "blind" from fleabay is too much of a gamble for my taste.
The rest of the required conversion (machining bits and pieces, brakes, etc) was also something rather expensive.
As for "similar money or less"... my repairs of the fork require:
- 2 fork tubes = 330 EUR
- fork oil
- fork seals, if needs be
- wheel axel (bent) = 30 EUR
... so under 450EUR, by all means.
No way could I do a full fork swap in the vicinity of that sum.

pff... I think that train left the station when I bought the fork tubes, which was 2 weeks ago.

Bad luck mate. You shouldn't really have to be doing all this work if other road users kept their eyes open and wits about them!

There are only a couple stages in fork disassembly that tend to give you a headache:

The first is undoing the damper rod bolt on the bottom of the fork leg. Sometimes they just come undone easily, other times the rod spins inside the fork leg and prevents you undoing the bolt. If you have access to a compressor and rattle gun, it’s easy. If not, you can compress the fork (caps and spring removed) and invert it placing a length on wooden dowel in the fork tube and resting that on the floor. If you press everything down as you undo the bolt, the added pressure on the top of the damper rod generally stops it spinning. There is a “special” tool to hold the damper rod in place, but I’ve taken my forks apart three times now and never needed one.

The second challenge is removing the top bush and oil seal from the fork leg in order to separate the fork. You can remove the top bush on the fork leg by using the fork tube as a slide hammer as the bottom bush on the fork tube won’t fit through the bush on the fork leg. Just push the tube down and pull it up until it hit the top bush with some force. Repeat this a couple of times and the bush will work its way off.

Assembly is the reverse. It’s easy to refit the bush in the fork leg (after fitting the damper rod, tube etc.) with a drift. Don’t worry this time about the damper rod spinning when you tighten the bottom bolt. Just get it on the best you can to ensure everything is seated right and then, when you’ve refitted the springs and caps, the tension will hold the rod in place and you’ll be able to tighten it easily.

Good luck. Hope you get back on the road soon...

__________________

Finally got around to install the new tubes.
I could thus take a better measure of the state of the yokes...

Bottom one is bent. Top one is cracked.




So it seams that after all I might be helping a fellow inmate improve his financial condition.