I made an earlier post where I stated that at Palo Verde Suspension, we can help with any of your vintage suspension needs. Well, "almost" any! There are some suspension systems that were pretty obscure in their day and finding parts for them now......well, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

But, here are a few examples of shocks that I brought back from the dead and they came out really well. You'd be amazed at how many parts, like seals and bushings, that were used 30 years ago by Showa and Kayaba, are the same things that today's suspension components use. Still, there are a lot of things that have to be hand crafted or modified to make them fit and work in the older stuff, and that's the part I like about working on these shocks. One has to rely heavily on years of knowledge built up on these items. Plus, a bit of craftsmanship and some imagination, as well.

So, with some visual aids, here's the latest vintage shocks I've worked on.

I apologize for the poor quality of this picture. This is the stock seal head out of a 1980/81 Kawasaki KX420. In all my years of doing suspension work, I've never worked on one of these before. It actually has a 20mm shock shaft! I had no idea and that was the toughest part of the whole rebuild - finding a 20mm oil seal that would work. Well, the internet can be a wonderful tool from time to time. I found a seal manufacturer who had a 20mm seal that wasn't too big on the OD, or too tall. However, it wasn't the right size for the stock seal head housing. I had to make a new housing from scratch.

Here's a picture of the inside of the seal head as I was spinning it up on the lathe. I never went to machinist school, so there's some trial-and-error involved in my machining method, but I have gotten pretty good at "free-hand machining"! The toughest part was not having an inside bit to make the top-out rubber groove. But I was able to get it done by using a boring bit at a severe angle and running the machine backwards. Gotta be creative sometimes!

The shock, in stock form, has a dust cap that screws into the body. This was a good thing for me because I was able to come up with a standard dimension dust seal that I didn't have to capture in the seal head itself. Even though the dust seal OD fit snugly into a locator I machined into the seal head body, the end cap took care of making sure it was held in place. It's these kinds of things that make it easier to create these partss from scratch.

Again, another poor picture, but you get the idea. Here's the finished seal head during the refilling process. You can just see the bump rubber at the top of the picture. I used a 16mm Showa CR-style bumper. It wasn't easy to fit onto the 20mm shaft, but with a little sanding on the OD of the base of the bumper, it worked great.

And here's the finished product! The spring weighed a ton! I didn't rate it but I can image it's in the 13 kilo rage - at least!

Next time I'll post the 1980 CR125 shocks we rebuilt. The before and after are pretty amazing!