05-05-2019, 05:11 AM
(05-04-2019, 06:22 PM)Grumpy Goat Wrote: Well I had the fork oil changed today and ended up spending essentially the whole day at the dealership, except for the 1.5 hour I took for lunch and a bit of shopping with the wife.
The service adviser had quoted 2 hours which, with the oil and parts and supplies, should have cost $287. After 3 hours he admitted that he had misquoted the job and that it should have been 2 hours labour per side but he was still going to charge me for 2 hours. I guess they must have slowed down after that, or it was giving them trouble, or since they were not making money off the job it got put in the slow lane, but I did not get it back until 4 PM and I had booked it in at 9 AM. I will be checking the time and price with my original BMW dealership where I know and have full confidence in the master technician, and am 100% sure that he would not have taken that long.
The adviser did say that they have a $500 tool to do the job and since our forks have a "cartridge" exchanging the oil requires some pumping of each fork to evacuate and to fill. I just checked my Haynes manual and this does not seems to be entirely correct, but there is some pumping required to get the oil to settle properly. Also, by reading the process in the Haynes manual the job indeed seems to be longer than 2 hours but not as long as 4 hours, but it is quite involved. A special tool is indeed required to be bought or made, so overall I am glad I had them do this job.
Anyway I ended up paying about $330 for the job. Do I feel a difference? Too early to say but I believe that there is less compression and rebound when stopping at a traffic light. I just hope that I don't see any oil weeping again. When I got home I did see a tiny bit of oil smear on the RHS fork so I wiped it off and will keep an eye on it.
You mentioned your original dealer and the confidence you had in the master tech. Were there issues with your original dealer that caused you to have the fork oil changed at another dealer or was the dealer who did the work closer/more convenient than your original dealer?
In my younger days I attempted to change the oil on an inverted cartridge fork (GSXR-1000) one time. As I found out removing the forks was the easy part. I ended up bringing the forks to the shop to have them change the oil and to properly set the fork oil level in the fork tubes.
If the fork oil level is not properly set in the fork tubes that will effect how much the forks dive under hard braking. The chamber of air in the fork tube acts as an air spring so that if the fork level is too low you will get more dive on braking and if the level is too high the fork will dive less on braking.