Renovate Or Evacuate

Did some encouraging progress on the Vard fork internals today; getting the first leg apart took 5 minutes, getting the second one apart took 5 hours. That’s the cool thing about old stuff, there’s always a risk involved... 

Notice the focus on the indicator needle; that focus means that in some miraculous way I managed to get the fork leg perfectly straight, if the leg was bent, even just 0.5 millimeter - the needle would be blurry. I know because I tried to cheat and get a photo of it before it was 100% straight and the needle would come out blurry every time, so I had to spend some (a lot) more time tweaking it before the focus became as preferred.

 

After glass blasting, heating, tweaking, wet sanding and polishing this is how happy it became, in the previous post you can see how crusty the legs were when I got them.

 

And here’s the leg after its final assembly, I just have to change the o-ring on the bottom part and it’ll be back in business. I just had to parkerize the spring while I was at it and I don't want to hard chrome the legs because that's not how they came from the Vard factory, so I gave them a real greasy polish and then I'm just going to WD-40 the upper legs from time to time, besides, the fork covers cover up the eternal upper legs so they won't be exposed to the elements all that much. The next thing I'm going to take care of is getting the tolerance inside the threaded top collars on the sliders just right against the upper fork legs. But for now, I’m going to drink heavily and listen to the Pogues - but I'll be back, hopefully...