[narlus]

saturday, in a true JRA situation, my monster T suddenly was getting only 3-4" of travel before it would bottom out harshly. no leaks, no obvious problems, didn't crash, fork still felt tight (no bushing slop was apparent)...weird. my only thought was taht somehow the bushings slipped down and was causing the slider to hit it prematurely?

anyway, i dropped it off @ cycle loft so i should get a post-mortem soon, but was wondering if anyone else ever had a situation like this.

i will say that i have seen the light re: lighter DH bikes...my wife was done for the day, so i swapped pedals on her 222 and ripped a few runs. though it was pretty undersprung for my weight, the thing flew. totally different suspension feel (5th element vs avy)

 

[DownCycles_Stef]

Well it could be one of two things....however I hate to say that from the sound of it, it's the worse of the two. Monster T's (new ones) have a bleed valve for air in them. You need to let that out, depending on conditions you may have a build up of pressure after even a few hard runs. Even the old Monster T's without a valve needed to have the top caps unscrewed and tightened to relieve the pressure.

Unfortunately though if that was the cause, you probably would have noticed the fork getting stiffer throughout the day. And it wouldn't have a harsh metal-on-metal bottom out feeling. The other cause of your problem is a broken internal. I feel like it's probably something related to your cartridges & springs. It's weird if it's your bushings because they have constant outward pressure on them from your stanchions and I've NEVER heard of them slipping below the legs and causing premature bottom out.

If that does happen to be the case however, I'd definitely send it back to Marzocchi and have the warranty department take a look at it. Unless you had the bushings changed by someone other than Marzocchi, I feel like they'd probably cover that under warranty because as I said before I've NEVER heard of that happening and considering the number of things that would need to go wrong just right for it to happen, in my mind it's a warranty case.

Good luck with it.

 

[narlus]

thanks stef. i've burped my monster before, and this was totally different from ramping up pressure via air buildup. i fear some internal damage, but again am trying to figure out what could have happened, and how. bushings have never been changed, fork had a complete overhaul in '05 (it's an '01).

 

[DownCycles_Stef]

Yeah I seriously doubted it was air pressure, but I always like to mention the obvious. It probably is internal damage of some fork or another. Again, probably something with the cartridge rods or springs. While I've never run into your situation before on a Monster T I did have a very similar issue with a Shiver.

Considering that the early generation Monster T's used nearly identical internals to the Shiver, it's possible it's the same issue. The Shiver I worked on was bottoming hard (happened suddenly but with crunching noise) like yours just about halfway into the travel. Once taking it apart I noticed that the black fluted piece of plastic that sits around the upper cartridge rod had broken. When I disassembled the cartridge I found tiny pieces of it were clogging the oil ports causing hydraulic lock-out before it went all the way through the travel. I'd say there's a fair chance that your fork is having a similar problem.

If your LBS didn't figure out the problem, tell them to check to make sure that if your fork has that fluted piece on the cartridge rod, to make sure it isn't chipped. It didn't take much plastic for the one I was working on to get clogged. As a heads-up though, if that is the problem with your fork, just go ahead and buy the new cartridge rod. Marzocchi told me that the fork would function with a thorough cleaning and fresh oil. But to be honest, if the part has already started to chip, it'll have sharp edges that are more likely to hook up and break further. Better to just fix the problem rather than put a band-aid on it.

 

[narlus]

nice one, thanks a ton for the info.