scale from 1 to 10 difficulty (No, I don't have any specialized tools) and is it worth $300 for a shop to do it for me?
Your difficulty and my difficulty might be two different levels... Fork seal changes involve: Jacking the front end up Removing calipers, fender and wheel Removing the forks from the triples Draining and dismantling the forks and driving the old seals out Cleaning the forks Driving new seals in Refilling with the right amount of oil Reassembling the forks Refitting the forks Refitting the wheel, brakes and fender Going flat out, probably 2 hours in labour alone, so if the $300 included the seals and oil, that sounds reasonable. Tools needed are basic hand tools, torque wrench, and a seal driver (a piece of 50mm PVC pipe 600mm long works a treat on 43mm forks), oil level gauge.
most important tool is a seal driving tool K&L makes a nice one. I have used a punch before on other peoples bike, good luck
without an impact driver getting the fork bottom bolt out can be a real problem. use the old seal placed on top of the new one to prevent damage during installation.
Yes Squirrelman - An air-impact wrench is nice to have, original poster could get by with an "impact-hammer" with the appropriate long 6mm socket attached to it along with BMFH. If the mechanical gawds are on his side, he may get lucky with just a ratchet and long allen. If said poster does not have the long allen he could caniblalize and bent key allen into a straight and go to town with a slightly smaller hammer. Side Bar: once, many many years ago, I was working on First Wife doing her fork seals for the first time in 20 yrs and 70,000 miles - long story short, I stripped the allen and had to use a drill to drill out the head, (really not that big a deal as once you get the head drilled out, you just use the stanchion as a slide hammer and everything detaches.)
Yep, at this point in time, its worth the $300 to pay someone else with the right tools to do it. I like doing things for myself though. There are a lot of posts on the interwebz about 8th gen forks leaking around 24k miles, so instead of mucking around with it, figured it replace them. Over the top? maybe, but she's worth it.
New one for me. This is the first posting on 8th gen forkseals leaking that I have read. Try a seal sweep first.
the oem honda seals are best, so be sure the shop uses only oem, not cheepo chinese imitations. very important ! ask to see the packaging. also, be sure they do both forks, not just the one leaking !
Yep, OEM is the best, at dealerships its not uncommon for some bad wrenches to just replace the offending fork seal and clean up the non-weepy one.
While you/the shop are in there, why not also get the bushes replaced? These are the bits that allow the forks to slide, and they do wear, and are pretty inexpensive.
I called both shops in my town and the earliest they can replace the seals are June 29th! Its a 2 hour job... So, SCREW 'EM, I'm doing it myself. I'll use the money I was going to pay them and buy the right tools.
