Fork tubes have a tough life. The worst part is being whacked by rocks and road stuff at high speeds closely followed by rust. New tubes can be expensive or hard to find but all is not lost. The chrome your forks came with can be chemically removed, the tubes can be re-plated with hard chrome, then ground to the correct size. The new finish is harder and tougher than what you had.
The shop LE had been using for a very long time closed. I did some searching and some checking and today I went for a tour. I was impressed, clean shop, helpful staff, the owner knows his stuff and they have been doing fork tubes.
As you can see from the first photo, they can do jobs much larger than fork tubes and shock shafts. The building was built for this purposes. The stripping and plating tanks shown were sunk into the ground and can handle 30 foot long parts. The tanks are steel, in a fiberglass shell, in a thick concrete tub. The large gray boxes provided the DC power for the tanks. Â Running between the converters are large air tubes for the special venting system that filters out the harmful chemicals.
Turn around time is two weeks or less, a big improvement from the month it took at the old place. I’ll post a photo of the first set of tubes late next week.
Below is the first set of tubes for LE. Â They are perfect. Â Check out the big yellow coffee cup they gave me!
