vack said:
Regardless of how you feel about the company or the reason they are no longer with us, I like my Stratos Fork, and if the gentleman who used to make them can point me in the right direction as to where to get springs, rebuild kits, seals. I'm more than willing to listen.
Heck Retro is in these days.............;p Seriously though if anyone knows where I can get some parts, or a manual to try to figure it out myself, please let me know.
We weren't talking about how we "feel", but rather how stratos imploded.
Anyways, there are potentially more problems with the seals. This is another excerpt from the ex-stratos employee.
...Oh, and the thing about the Seals on the S8
Two things:
Part One - we used to have these brilliant seals that we used on the Stratashock Pro - very high quality and very expensive. We started using them on the S8 and the first few hundred worked like a charm.
Then, before the second season started, all hell breaks loose. Leaks?
OMFG!
My beard went grey in one month.
It took months before we found out what was going on. We changed production on the housings, reduced diameters, tried and tried again and again to fix the problem.
This prevented the fork guards, btw, from ever happening. We made our own out of PVC and zip ties.
Turns out, the Seals we'd been buying for years from one company overseas had moved the production from one country to another. From Japan to China.
But, instead of sending the molds, they'd sent drawings. e-Mail! aaaaaaah! So the new molds were out of tolerance and the seal mfg'r didn't want to tell us.
Part Two By the time that was finally resolved, I was no longer associated with the company. They came up with 'Tiger' seals and some other company was making them.
But one year of bad seals is all it takes if the rest of the company is unresponsive to market concern! By ignoring it, and in many cases outright denying it, they poisoned the tiny number of bike enthusiasts that wanted to buy boutique-brand products.
Sure, Rock Shox could have faulty Ti-Ni coating on all their stanchions and have a recall and such. They could have bad seals for a season or two and just toss the entire event on the shyt-heap. Who cares? People ***** and complain about it, swear never to use it again, yadda yadda.
But Rock Shox's real market isn't 'Early Adopters' or 'Innovators' or the tiny 'Enthusiast' market. It's Gary Fisher/Trek and Pacific Cycles.
But Stratos - it had a worldwide market of about 8,000 customers and each and every one of them was a vocal and savvy bike beast who not only rode all the time, but also talked to other BikeBeasts all the damn time. Certainly not BikeFred out for one of the three 'trail rides' he'll have this year.
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So, even if you find "stratos" seals, they may actually be totally wrong. The best thing to do may be to take your seals to a seal/hydraulic supply store. These are usually in the industrial area of a city. Have them try to match the specs of the seals. Otherwise other suppliers like marzocchi, RS, and Push can probably supply 35mm seals, but you have no guarentee they'll work.
Ever wonder what those cool looking "dimples" are at the end of your uppers? The forks were made to accept some huge car-bearing or something that served as the "wrench" to loosen those caps. That's what holds the seals in place evidently (I never had to take em off). A strap-wrench should be sufficient I'd imagine.
There are no "kits" for stratos stuff.
I'd also suggest taking a look at the hydraulic cartridge. I had the glide-ring fail on my MX6, which caused clunking in the travel. Well, don't take it apart if it isn't broken, but it was a wear-item prone to failure.
As far a springs, you could probably make a variety of springs work, possibly with spacers made out of PVC pipe.
It's not going to be impossible to rebuild stratos forks, but it is going to be extremely challenging and going to take some resourcefulness. Good luck.
Yeah, stratos had some good damping cartridges based on sound principles (which hasn't always been the case for the bigger manufacturers), but they fell behind in so many other areas, then there were the QC/design issues, then there was the squandering of resources and simply many bad business decisions. Once you get a few pages into this thread, you see the real picture. It starts off with simple conjecture and assumptions.
http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?t=165385&highlight=stratos