The bike I bought used last year came with a sr suntour xcr 34 air fork. I didn’t keep up on maintenance as well as I should have and only just recently serviced the fork. It still doesn’t feel like it did, so I’m wondering if there is a way I can repair it?
by Ill_Beautiful_7697
6 Comments
What was the service you did?
The visible wear of the stanchions is not necessarily such a big deal. Most forks can be serviced back to feeling like or near new.
You could order new uppers if you could find them and do a full service, but it won’t make sense cost wise. Just buy a new fork like a rock shox recon.
The coating on the stanchions is gone, I bet the bushings in the lowers are too. Not sure what type of bushings xcr uses but stanchions being that bad, you need to get a new fork to make it work smooth again. No point in trying to replace those parts on a cheap fork like that.
The current fork isn’t dangerous as is, but the performance will likely be pretty bad.
Carefully disassemble the fork, being organized by labeling each part and noting its location and position. Clean everything, including the seals and internal foam inserts. Replace any damaged or worn O-rings, and re-lubricate both the spring and seals with fork grease. Soak the foam inserts in fork oil for a couple of hours. Clean the stanchions thoroughly. If they are scratched, rub the affected area with very fine wet/dry sandpaper until it feels smooth to the touch. Apply silicone grease to the seals and stanchions. Reassemble everything, and you’re done.
Those are steel stanchions with a nickel plating for corrosion protection. The black you see coming off is paint. That is just what happens on these forks. The black coating is significantly less durable than anodization finish you see on more expensive forks with aluminum stanchions. But the black is just for color. The nickel you see barely showing through is the important layer.
And there is nothing you can do in a years time that is not “keeping up with maintenance”.
The black coming off isnt going to hurt anything. Its still nickel plated underneath, so it wont rust.
Its a really cheap fork, so you can just ride it as is until it fails. Then replace it. Its really not worthy of obsessive maintenance because fork maintenance is expensive.
The most I would do is a lowers service, which is pretty easy. You just change the bulk of the oil in the lowers and replace the dust wipers you see in the picture. Still the cost may not be worth it. A bike shop charges $100 for that. If you DIY, you have to buy a larger quantity of oil ($30), seal drivers ($10 on amazon for cheap ones), and the seal kit ($20 online). Plus youll need some other standard tools.
Not really, but the long answer is more complicated. Everything about servicing cheap forks is screwed up the existence of cheap Rockshox.
Depending on where you are… Here, you can get a motion control Rockshox Recon silver with motion control for £150 and that makes spending any significant amount of money on an XCR a terrible idea. Fluids, sure, seals maybe. Professional servicing, very very rarely, hard parts, absolutely not. It’s not that the XCR is junk, it’s that being able to get a moco rockshox for so little is absolutely insane value- they are genuinely good, reliable, solid performing forks, it’s not so long ago that motion control was their top end fork. It makes their entire Turnkey range utterly irrelevant and it is a big upgrade from any basic fork. It’s a bit heavy is all.
So the answer, if you’re spending more than a few bucks, is always “get a better fork”, because good forks are so cheap.
In theory you can buy a replacement CSU (ie upper legs) through a Suntour vendor. But it costs too much to be at all viable, and any good shop will tell you so, I genuinely would consider anyone taking your money for this to be dishonourable. Also, the wear you can see is probably also matched with some wear to the bushings but that honestly doesn’t matter because of the cost thing
Now a random thing about the XCR is that the black layer is effectively cosmetic, over steel (or at least it was, for the 32, I assume the 34 is the same). In fact it’s worse than that, since it wears and gets ugly and some of that worn material will end up inside the legs. So what you can do (again I have done this with a 32, not with a 34), is polish it all off, and polish the steel legs up to a good smooth finish and shine. This will genuinely work exactly the same as the black did when it was new, just with a very slight loss of corrosion resistance. This is <specific advice>, you cannot do it to most black stanchioned forks. And so to some people it will sound insane.
So if you absolutely had to keep teh fork going and you have no budget for a new fork, that’s what you can do. Shine it up to the max, get everything inside scrupulously clean, relube it all. It might improve performance, it will certainly improve looks. But that’s the absolute limit of what makes any sense.