I guess that I have been shying away from looking at the girder forks for a while - it occurred to me that I have never dismantled a set of forks like these but having dived straight into it, it's dead easy.
The first job was to make sure the back of the bike was strapped tightly to the lift table and then use the scissor lift to raise the engine a bit. Then I gingerly loosened the front wheel in its clamp and confirmed that everything was stable.
Pulling the forks about revealed a lot of movement and I made a little video:
There you go - clearly a number of problems there.
Removing the spindles and replacing them with scrap round bar allowed me to have a look at the links. The part you would call the bottom yoke in a conventional telescopic fork is called the fork crown by Ariel, and the links attached to the crown at the bottom are pretty worn:
Both sides, as you can see. This means the links will need bushing or replacement; the top ones are worse.
Fortunately removing the crown and steering column revealed that indeed there were no balls in the steering head bearings, so that will account for a lot of the movement.
I will probably clean up this area and leave it in factory paint as it is in quite good condition.
The steering head races had two balls left in them. We will clean them up and see how worn they are.
Ariel call this bit the ball head clip - it carries the handlebars and the spindle for the top links. Said spindle was absolutely solid in the clip and I had to resort to the splendid Rothenberger Surefire 2 to warm the grease up and get it to move.
The spindle came out eventually - but look at the state of it. The bike has also been used with the spindles loose which has worn most of the thread away and part of the link too.
The main girder assembly looks pretty good:.
I'll repair these worn areas though - it looks like the mudguard has been loose and has fretted the fork leg. These will build up with weld.
Whilst the girder fork assembly is still a bit contaminated with old grease, I'm quite confident that the spindle bores are good enough.
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