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MarkyJ

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Yesterday I got these forks at a very reasonable price, but unfortunately they have no identifying marks on them. Do any of you knowledgeable chaps know what make they are? Your help is greatly appreciated. ;)
 
Looks like a Marzocchi motorcycle trials fork. It's where the mountain bike version of the Monster T came from. This is assuming there is no brake arch, which seems to be the case. I know the Monster T was developed from the 40mm trials motorcycle chassi and that looks to be it.
 
It might be an avalanche brand fork. The marzochhi forks I've seen on motorcycles have had steel stanchion tubes.

I'm not an expert on marzochhi's motorcycle forks by any means.
It's not an avalanche fork, avalanche only made inverted forks. I'm not an expert on Marzocchi motorcycle forks, but I have seen one of the "monster T" trials forks in real life, as well as there are plenty of online resources that show similar forks. Noleen made a right-side-up DH fork back in the day without a brake arch I believe, and there might have been one or two others, but that's an extremely rare configuration to see with a mountain bike, vs very common with motorcycles, not to mention I can tell by the top-caps that it's a Marzocchi and they were known to make quite a few of those trials type forks. Now whether or how someone shoe-horned it on a mountain bike might be more of a question. From what I understood, it didn't take much to adapt the fork to mountain bikes, so maybe that's how this one got to where it is.
 
It's one of those old Stratos DH forks.

Darren
Don't think so Darren. I had a Stratos MX6, it was basically the production version of the much rarer SS6, their first DH fork. There are enough visual cues to differentiate this I think. Also, measure the stanchions. The stratos forks were all 35mm. The dimpled seal cap and axle location are dead giveaways, not to mention the preload adjuster on the fork pictured above is marzocchi-style, and the big round damper adjuster above it is almost exactly like on my old handmade 1998 Super T (actual knob and not a flat for a screwdriver). Also noticed the rounded top and holes in his crown, much more "marzocchi" than "stratos", and then there's the crazy crown-offset on the stratos forks due to no leading axle.
Stratos MX6
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Stratos SS6
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In it's day, the first fork, the SS6, was groundbreaking and they milled it out of solid tubes, extremely time and resource consuming. According to them, it cost more money to make the fork than they sold it for. Had a pretty good cart with shimmed rebound and compression setups.

Their downfall is that they never updated the chassi. In about the same year marzocchi did the Super T (handmade), where the lowers were again CNCed out of massive blocks of aluminum. As other manufacturers moved on, Stratos only came out with the SS7, MX6 and FR4/5. Excluding the SS8 which was decent but super heavy, these forks all used the same basic construction and "wrap-around" arch that was NOT bolted to the lowers. There was a compression-deal that wrapped around the leg and "tightened", but no direct bolt-on interface. This made it quite flexy given the size of the stanchions and lowers, especially if you had a regular QR type axle on it (I think at least he FR4 and 5 could be ordered that way, but I think it may have been an option on the MX6 too). Then the seals for the SS7s got totally screwed up when production was moved from one offshore factory to another, resulting in mass leakages. Another big issue with many of the SS7s was that the lower crown got machined wrong at the shop, instead of being thicker as indicated in the plans and having a recessed area to assist with popping off the headset race, the entire lower crown got machined at the "smallest diameter" that was intended to only be for a specific spot, resulting in an extremely under-speced/under-strength crown. This was a major production screwup and all of these contributed big time to stratos going under. Apart from their SS6 which WAS groundbreaking with most of it's construction and features, decent damping back then was a rarity, they never really moved forwards and many of their future endeavors made things worse and worse.

Interesting forks though, I also had the SS8 and that was crazy, haha.

I'm pretty sure the fork in the picture is a marzocchi trails fork, there have been a lot through the years but some internet searches turn up some very similar stuff.
 
You're right. Boy that Stratos really wasn't a very good looking product IMO.

Darren
They didn't improve with time. I have a helix rear shock here. I put in on my little sisters bike to ride to school in case it got stolen.
No such luck.
 
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