54 Bike’s leaking forks rendered its suspension and brakes useless
Chris Davies got a nasty surprise when this dodgy old Bandit 600 rolled up
Top mechanic Chris Davies always tries not to judge a book by its cover, but he found that incredibly hard when he saw a battered Suzuki Bandit 600 pull up.
He said: “I knew I was going to have my work cut out. The lad had run into no end of problems with it and had lost interest.”
Chris, 38, who works at Davies Motorcycles in Ilkeston, has been in the bike trade for 18 years, so he’s seen most things and the only ‘maintenance’ this Bandit had received was a classic bodge job. The right-hand fork seal had started leaking sometime in the past because the fork tube had a rough patch from stone-chipping, so the rider had packed tissues under the fork seal cap to soak it up. That might work for 20 minutes. But this rider had continued to ride the bike for hundreds of miles and fork oil had been pumped out past the soaked tissue before trickling onto the brake caliper and all over the pads. “When I stripped the fork leg there was no oil left, so the handling must have been horrendous as well as having no brakes. All it would have taken was a car pulling out or a big pothole and he’d have been down.”
It only cost the work-shy rider about £150 to put it all right, but the consequences could have been horrendous. All he had to do was check his bike over regularly and he would have seen that oil was starting to appear on the fork tube at a certain place, then he could have found the cause simply by running a finger nail up and down the leg, feeling for that rough patch, before getting the tube repaired and a crisp new seal in there. That’s why when you buy a used bike it’s always doing that check yourself, as well as sliding any dust caps out of the way before pumping the forks up and down to check for leaks.
‘Oil had gone down the fork leg and into the caliper’