Freezing fork seals?

Ya IDK why Jayem has had so much trouble with his Enduros but everyone else is adiment that they are better than OEM...including me.

I would call Chris at Enduro seals and ask him how cold weather effects his performance. He does constant testing with durometers and tolerances for these exact issues so I am sure he could shed some light on the situation.

When I installed my NEW Enduro seals on my Floats it was obviouse that my small bumb compliance was better...maybe just because of the new lubricants though. The point is I didn't have to 'break them in' like the old Enduro seals. I don't have years of ride time on them yet but after 10 rides or so...not a drop of oil.

I also put them in my Junior-T's but the original seals worked fine. My Marzocchi seals have always been pretty dang nice. My 09 888 seals havn't wept a drop.

PsyCro said:

Marz .. India .. 2006 ..

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Marzocchi seals seal better than any other seals out there; for those with Fox and Rock Shox seals who have experience only this approach to sealing; Marzocchi uses what you could call a 2 stage seal; the visible part is a dust wiper, which is followed by a separate oil seal.

All seals shrink in lower temps; Enduro even suggests putting the seals into the freezer before installing them into the lowers.

I'm guessing that those of you who are spewing oil may have a little too much of it in the fork; the fork compressing will increase the internal pressure and force some oil out. The unfortunate thing is the air pressure loss; seems like riding in cold temps may be best accomplished with a coil spring and no air preload (you could come up with a spacer to put between the coil and the top cap on the 66 Light to preload the spring); I've had no issues with my 66SL and the 55ATA riding in really cold temps, but those are fully enclosed cartridges.

Finally, Marzocchi did make a move out of Italy for their production in 2006 but that affected the 2007+ equipment. They moved to Taiwan where most manufacturers already are. Unfortunately for Marzocchi they had to learn the ropes of dealing with Taiwan that year and it seems to be taking them a while to get things dialed.

_MK

Turveyd, it's scary that you spread info without the right information : /

In 2007 or so Marzocchi was bought buy Tenneco. A $6.2 billion fortune 500 company that originated in automotive.

With the change in ownership, Tenneco moved their manufacturing to the Tiwaan (highly reputable mtb manufacting btw) to the same facility as the SR Suntour suspension. 2008 was the first year of new production and there were flaws. Specifically loose bushings and improper sized o-rings. Both issues carried over into the early production 2009 stuff but the range is pretty small. I have a 2009 that was built in like november of 2008 and it is perfect.

I consider 2008 an unownable year. From what I have read 2009 forks seem to be pretty solid but 2010 they really made some good changes.

They improved their bushings as well as their bushing installation to resolve the bushing issue. They introduced the new Ti series with some serious weight loss in the stanchions and spring. They introduced the new Evo damper for the people who think they can make a shim stack. They even ditched the ATA all together (bad move imo) to try and increase reliablity.

Only time will tell but I think in terms of reliablity and simplicity Marzocchi will be on top. For performance, heck RC3 was good enough for me, but lets see if the tubability of the Evo can compete with the 40 and Boxxer damping.

If they bring ETA back to the XC lineup I think they would have have something a lot of riders would want.

Bikesair said:

Ya IDK why Jayem has had so much trouble with his Enduros but everyone else is adiment that they are better than OEM...including me.

I would call Chris at Enduro seals and ask him how cold weather effects his performance. He does constant testing with durometers and tolerances for these exact issues so I am sure he could shed some light on the situation.

When I installed my NEW Enduro seals on my Floats it was obviouse that my small bumb compliance was better...maybe just because of the new lubricants though. The point is I didn't have to 'break them in' like the old Enduro seals. I don't have years of ride time on them yet but after 10 rides or so...not a drop of oil.

I also put them in my Junior-T's but the original seals worked fine. My Marzocchi seals have always been pretty dang nice. My 09 888 seals havn't wept a drop.

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Let me get this strait, you're saying the Enduros were better than your stock Fox seals and that you can't detect any difference between the Enduros and the OEM marzocchi seals?

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID BEFORE

Do people even read the posts they discuss? I said that the Enduros were a good improvement due to the Fox system, due to how piss-poor the Fox system is, and that I've never been able to detect them being any "better" than an OEM Marozcchi seal. In addition to my own forks, I've used the Enduros in customer's forks, including Fox. Marzocchi would have had to screw up their seal spec for Enduro to actually do something, but Marzocchi has never screwed up seal specs as far as I know. To compare, RS seal specs were pretty poor on the older boxxers around 1998-2003, and stratos speced seals that were way off right before they went out of business. Otherwise, the dual-energized high-pressure oil seal and energized dust seal that Marzocchi uses isn't going to be "beat" by anything as long as the specs are correct.

I ride my 66 pretty hard, for a while the RFX/6pack was the only bike I had. That included a wide assortment of jumps and drops obviously. With the repetition and abuse that I was putting the bike through, I noticed that I got almost 2 years out of the OEM seals, and about 1 year out of each set of Enduro seals, which isn't bad and I'm not complaining about the Enduro seals, given that I don't wipe the stanchions down and probably let a little too much time go in between oil changes. With how hard I ride, the year or so I get out of them seems to be a reasonable compramise. The fork is from 2006 as well, so if it's just the occasional seal change I'm pretty happy (and I've been happy overall with the fork).

There's just nothing I can detect or that I've experienced with Enduro seals that would lead me to believe that they are better than decent OEM seals. Once again (I said this before in the other thread), this excludes Fox, because those are piss-poor. They are a good alternative to OEM seals.

Bikesair said:

They introduced the new Evo damper for the people who think they can make a shim stack.

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Not quite, although the tunability aspect of it is pretty cool, the prior dampers were extremely crude in function and the Evo uses an actual shim-stack with a needle-valve for low-speed. The old RC3 wasn't really much different than the old HSCV/SSV cartridge dampers from back in 1998, the base-valve was pretty much the same, and the "compression adjustment" that came out with RC2 and 3 simply made the fork harsher and didn't really adjust low-speed compression to give you any usefull adjustment. Now, the base-valve evidently has a real shim-stack (older ones did have the shims, but not really "stacked" for high speed control) and real low-speed compression adjustment.

Hopefully that's why they introduced it, because the RC3/2 stuff was far far behind the times. It was pretty much the same as they'd been making for 10+ years. RS, Fox and Manitou damping technology were lightyears ahead, and now Marz has caught up a bit.