From ADVrider:
There has been a lot of discussion in the CRF1000L Africa twin suspension thread about the premature failure of the front forks. These failures look to be affecting the majority of people who have inspected their forks so far. It affects all years of the CRF1000L model years 2016 and newer, as far we can tell so far. The purpose of this thread is to bring attention to this problem so current owners can get their forks inspected before they are out of warranty and new prospective owners can make an informed decision about buying this bike. Ultimately we want to put pressure on Honda to acknowledge the problem and ultimately engineer a fix to the issue. The only way that this will happen is if they end up feeling it in their bottom line.
The Problem
The Upper fork tube (the gold tube on your forks) will show premature wear of the anodized hard coating on the inside of the fork tube where the lower fork tubes upper bushing rides. It is roughly at the location where the lower clamp of the triple clamp holds the forks but on the inside of the upper fork tube. The wear is evident as low as 200km of hard riding, but most normal riders are seeing it after about 3000km. To put that in perspective the fork anodizing is supposed to last the life of the bike.
Why does this matter
The upper fork tube has an anodized coating applied (the gold color) to the outside and inside of the tube. This coating has two main purposes. It protects the base aluminum metal of the fork tube from corrosion and it also creates a hardened layer that allows the lower fork tube to be able to slide inside the upper fork tube without wearing away the aluminum base metal of the fork. Without the hard anodizing the aluminum base metal would wear away a lot faster and would also create a lot more friction which would severely decrease the forks ability to slide smoothly up and down. Once the anodizing is worn away exposing the aluminum base metal, the added friction causes what is called in the suspension business “Stiction”. Stiction is the friction that tends to prevent stationary surfaces from being set in motion. Stiction is the enemy of a well-designed fork, because it decreases the performance of the suspension. Small bumps and undulations in the road will not be able to overcome the stiction and will end up transmitting those imperfections to the rider. It can also have a detrimental effect on dynamic maneuvers like cornering. This could, in the worst case, cause your bike’s suspension to not react to the road surface properly and lose traction.
Topic: CRF1000L Fork tube internal wear....Heads Up (Read 2567 times)
