How to rebuild a Koni 7610 (Dial-A-Ride) shock

The Koni Rebuild Game began today. With the Hagons back in their rightful place, attempting to prop up the back of the CB, I have all the time I need to figure this out. The first hurdle is that I'm far too tight to spend the ludicrous amount demanded by everybody for motorcycle spring compressors - around £40 seems to be the going rate, and they look wimpy at that. For £7.50 delivered I bought a pair of "Marksman" car ones..

Hmm, they don't really fit. I can soon sort that.

There we go. I smell like a blacksmith but I've saved myself over half a day's wages and, most importantly, I haven't given in to paying extra for yet another inferior bike specific product. You have to compress the spring enough so that the top collar can be slid down to where the push rod is, and then it'll just slide out. Then you can pull the spring off the top, which is kind of easy, followed by the preload collar - it all lifts straight off the top.

The next step is to break into the cylinder by undoing the top, known as the "gland nut". For this you need a (very) decent pin spanner with 4mm pins, or a gland nut wrench but they are amazingly expensive.

After buying a Koni (must've been very old stock) seal kit off ebay for a mere £11.99, my enthusiasm for this was rekindled and I decided to just attack the gland nut with mole grips instead.

It was actually pretty easy to undo with these. It's not even marked very much, though of course the correct tool would be preferable. Undoing this lets me pull out the innards with all the damping gubbins within, and frees some oil:

At this point I was confused, everything I had read said there was a 12mm bolt at the bottom of this but there isn't, there's just a rivet.

So I emailed the long suffering Geoff at Ikon in Australia yet again, and the poor bloke sighed into his morning Castlemaine XXXX and typed a reply to my silly questions one more time, despite there not even being any money in it for him. His response was a long and very confusing piece of text, but the upshot was they are all riveted like that, sir, and that the tube comes off anyway. So.. Stick it in the vice:

You may notice it's a bit rusty - turns out shock absorber parts are not happy being in the open air for long. Can't be helped though. It also turns out that the tube comes away from the flying saucer thingy that has the fat O ring on top of it (if you have a Koni in front of you you'll know what this means!). Mine was just stuck with oil, nothing more.

From here it's easy. At the end of the chrome rod there is the fabled 12mm bolt, undo it and all the stuff can be pulled off. So easy!

The picture above is of the gland nut and the seal. The seal in this one simply pushed out by hand, and the new seal pushed in - I think this is very strange and I will probably be back in there soon replacing this nut. The other non-leaking shock needed the seal pressing out with a socket in the vice, and the new one pressing in - this seems more like how it should be. I wonder how much a gland nut is though.. The first seal was so loose the rod pushed it out again as I was trying to put things back together, so I pushed it into the gland nut once it was all on the rod. All a bit strange.

Anyway, put it all back on the rod in the same order but with your new seals in place and tighten the 12mm bolt to 9Nm. Geoff suggested using 263 Loctite, I didn't bother. Slide the tube back on and now it's time to fill 'er up. Wielding the tube like He-Man is optional.

You now must fill the empty body with 80-85ml of SAE 5 oil, or if you don't have any (who does?) some "decent quality" 5w fork oil will do. I found just enough Putoline 5w in a bottle that must've been open for 20 years, I figured this was very high quality as it was immediately available. Ease the damping tube into the full-of-oil shock body, trying to to let any overflow out the top. I found it best to separate the flying saucer from the tube and let the tube fill with the oil, then it was easy.

Tighten the gland nut to 50Nm, 569 Loctite is recommended but I don't have any so didn't bother. Since I did it up with mole grips I also have no idea how close to 50Nm it was, but it's pretty damn tight.

Put the preload adjuster back on, slide the shock up inside the spring, stick the collar in and let off the spring compressors..

Job done innit? Now do it again, the next one will only take you an hour - promise! It's easy when you know how.