dissasembly of rear shock covers

G-Man · Post by **G-Man** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:49 am

Bill

Thanks! Just have to complete the rest of the bikes now....... :-)

G

jensey · Post by **jensey** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 11:05 am

Hi G,

How could I have missed this one ? Great thread,

Jensen

G-Man · Post by **G-Man** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 1:38 pm

Hi Jensen

I sort of hijacked this thread so I plan to put it in one of its own sometime. It's taken me a while to get this far but slow progress is better than no progress, I suppose.

G

oldjapanesebikes · Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:34 am

G-Man wrote:Last post for the time being. Here are the original CL77 damper bodies, rechromed with new sleeve nut and seal holder with new 10 x 22 x 7 seal inserted.

CL77 - 10mm Reassembled Damper by graham.curtis, on Flickr

G

Excellent work and thank you for sharing !

Obviously this is equally applicable to other makes also and at the moment I have a 1968 Suzuki Cobra in pieces which I see has a similar rear damper set up with the crimped lip. Like the CL77, the rear damper body on the Suzuki measures 30mm, and the rod is 10mm, but there is very little clearance between the OD of the damper body and the ID of the external spring. I have perhaps 1.8mm to work with, so before going too far I was wondering what the OD of the threaded retainer sleeve you made up was ? Thanks !

G-Man · Post by **G-Man** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:54 am

Hi

It's all a bit tight but doable... :-)

Shock bodies 30mm OD
Spring 33.5mm ID
Sleeve nut 33mm OD

I have checked some early style CL72 shocks and they are the same apart from the 1mm pitch (25.4 tpi) thread compared with my 26tpi. My old lathe is an imperial machine so I couldn't do a metric thread.....

Sounds like you have less material to play with but you could try some Girling springs as they are a bit larger diameter.

You may also be able to do an internal version a little like the early CB77 ones. I was a bit reluctant to do an internal thread inside the shock body but had to do it inside the sleeve nut anyway in the end.

Happy to share a bit more detail on the technique if you send me a pm.

Good luck!

G

G-Man · Post by **G-Man** » Wed Oct 30, 2013 2:20 pm

A bit of an update on the rear shock restoration. I was rebuilding some early CL72 dampers and when I got them back together the rebound damping was way to stiff. I could barely pull the rod back out but they pushed in pretty easily.

I used some 15 grade oil and didn't want to go back to thinner oil as it would just be too soft on the bump damping. I experimented a little with the rebound washers which are really spring-loaded one-way valves. With the 15w oil it worked just fine when I reduced them to just one of the thinnest washers on each side.

CL77 - Screw Top Complete disassembly.jpg by graham.curtis, on Flickr

The washers are on the left side of the picture.

G

hotrodhendrix · Post by **hotrodhendrix** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 12:40 pm

I need to do this so I can powdercoat the covers to match the bike on my CA77. Looks fairly easy once you manage to make the tools. They seem to be the hardest part.
Thanks for the write up

~James