This weekend I had a few Gold Valve installs to do so I thought I would get them all done all at once. After taking out the compression valve I noticed something strange. It didn't take long to figure out what it was. This fork probably had very little, if any, compression damping:




AAHHHH!!!! That's much better!



The moral of the story here is a reminder to keep everything as clean as possible. I don't wipe my workbench down to a sanitized level after each step or anything, but I certainly do not allow stuff like this to float around inside of a set of forks that I work on! I've seen some questionable stuff before, but this was a first.

 

are those metal shavings?

 

Yes, aluminum. They came from a ham-fisted assembler I think. I found some nasty chunks out of the bottom-out cone, that's where I think they came from.