New to the Forum & XJ900 Seca fork questions!

Hi all from a wet & windy UK

I've bought my old 1983 US import XJ900 Seca from its third owner since I sold it.

When I had it, I did very little to it as it was my winter hack & I only owned it for about a year (but always regretted selling it).

This time I'm tidying it up to make it a summer only daily. Not a full rebuild (mechanically it's not bad), but everything out of the frame (which is intact but has a lot of surface rust) & all the painted bits cleaned & repainted; plus any really knackered bits rebuilt as I go.

So I've pulled it down & I'm hitting a few issues, the big one right now is the front forks...

The front forks are worn (oil tight but I can rock the stanchions forwards & backwards a little) & the antidive was disabled when I bought it the first time around (the link hoses from the brakes had been removed & blanked at each end).

Should I get new Bushes & seals for the forks & rebuild them, or should I swap out the forks for later ones, which the Haynes book of lies seems to suggest didnt have antidive (assuming that is even possible as a quick swap).

If I rebuild them, should I repair the antidive, I never really had any issue with it being disabled, so is it worth the effort? Also, is there an antidive blanking plate for the XJ900 to lose the bulk of the unit, I think they were made for the XJ750, which seems to be a slightly different design.

Anyone been there & wished they had done it differently, or were glad they did it how they did?

 

Chacal should have the bushings, and the seals, in stock.
I am on the fence with this. I love to keep a bike original when possible, and the anti-dive setup on the 900 was really good, but...
For a few hundred dollars you can swap in a set of forks that are two generations newer. I think that all you need are the correct headstock bearings to swap forks from an R1.

FWIW on the anti-dive, I can definitely tell that the anti-dive on my xj750r makes a difference under braking. Going back to a bike with a regular fork throws me off for a while because of the (to me) excessive front end dive. Of course I might feel differently if I could afford a really good set of modern forks.

 

When I bought mine, the anti-dive was already disabled, the same way yours is (hoses removed and blanked). I wasn't happy with the way the forks worked at first, they were too soft and I felt a clunk on every bump in the road. They also leaked a bit , so I decided to open them, and realized that I didn't have equal amounts of oil in each fork and that it was very dirty. I didn't have to replace anything but the dust seals and the oil seals (bushes were ok according to the gurus here), put some 15W oil and betweem 10 and 15 psi of air in the upper forks.

The bike handles fine to my kind of riding now for a minimum expense, but I can't compare since I haven't had the chance to ride it with the anti-dive enabled. I still have a little clunk in it , but that's another story (probably some wear in the stem bearings).

 

That little clunk might be a bushing that we were wrong about.

 

Possible, but if I remember well, Chacal himself told me they were good.

 

Dibbler, if you ever decide to disassembly your forks for maintenance and/or for some fixing, i'D be interested in seeing pictures because mine didn't look like they were supposed to down inside, so i'D be curious to compare with yours.