Fork Mod - 1 1/4" to 1 1/8"

[iRob]

Help please.

 

Rant on

I recently bought a 1995 Gary Fisher Montare from a bike shop in Cape Town. The guy really did his best to sell me this bike and if I'd known what he was selling me I'd run. But anyway he offered a lot of extras which do kind of make up for him selling me a dud, and me buying a dud.

Rant off

 

I can use the bike for commuting and need to replace the fork - here is the tricky bit. The old Manitou had a 1 1/4 inch steerer. Most new fork (pre tapered steerers) are 1 1/4". Fixing this is proving costly. My current fix involves designing and manufacturing a bushing with an ID of 1 1/8' to fit a modern fork (Suntour makes one my LBs says retails for R890 - Vbrake mounts, remote lockout ALLES.) and a 1 1/4' OD to fit the frame head set. The problem with this is then finding bearings for the top and bottom - those diameter bearings are not easy to come by.

 

Has anyone had a similar situation or has there been a cheap fix for this?

 

Any constructive help is welcome......

[iRob]

Ok - so after some more googling I see a steerer adapter could work, but these seem to be for more modern tapered steerers. Has anyone fitted this for my kind of application?

[iRob]

Come on... Where are the all the semi professional bike mechanics?! Or engineers?

[iRob]

Does anyone know who imports ChrisKing - I've found this - Hopefully it works.....

 

http://chrisking.com/headsets/hds_devo

[droo]

Looks like it'll work, but expect to pay upwards of 2k...

 

I'd recommend you speak to Kevin at BMC in Woodstock, or Nils at Woodstock Cycle Works. If there's a fix for your issue one of them will know about it.