• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

50 Zokes Tips And Tricks

lankydoug

lankydoug

Husqvarna
Pro Class
I thought I'd start a thread to post tips on the 50 Zokes open chamber forks, kind of like the jetting data base threads.

Here is a little start from my own experience.

I weigh 210 lbs W/O gear. I re-sprung the rear of my 09 WR250 with a 5.6 spring and felt the fork springs were close the way they came. I disassembled them and found hard waxy grease (like a high temp wheel bearing grease) around the valving especially at the bottom of the fork. I cleaned the valves with brake clean and at the advise of a reputable suspension tuner I replaced the fork oil with 10w. His reason for 10w was that the Zokes have some internal leaks and 10w would minimize the affect of this. I believe the waxy grease is responsible for the occasional blast through the dampening and the unpredictable kick due to a dab of grease getting hung in the valving.

So today the heat let up today and I got out for an hour to ride before the downpour of rain and I can say that this helped the forks quite a bit.

My old stock settings were;
5w stock oil which looked good but needed changed due to break in.
oil level was 110 mm
compression dampening 18 clicks in
rebound dampening 12 clicks in
fork height in triple clamps even with 2nd groove

New settings;
10w Belray
oil level 130mm
compression damp 11 clicks
rebound damp 12 clicks
fork height 2nd groove

I think there is room for improvement but this was a real help and is very rideable. I will have to ride some more and play with the clickers some more but right now it feels to me like a progressive spring might be the final piece to the puzzle, by making the 1st part of the travel a little softer to absorb the roots and little kickers a little better but as it is now it soaks up the heavy stuff in the middle really well.
 
Great idea but can we do it as a zokes, tips and tricks? That way we can capture 45's and others. Vinduro did an awesome posting a while back with setting up suspension and maybe he can slide it over here or slide this up in the tech reference section?
 
dartyppyt said:
Great idea but can we do it as a zokes, tips and tricks? That way we can capture 45's and others. Vinduro did an awesome posting a while back with setting up suspension and maybe he can slide it over here or slide this up in the tech reference section?
Click to expand...

Sounds great to me. Combining them will be a great way to compare differences as well.
 
I found the same goop in mine when I replaced the seals. I went back with Bel-Ray 7wt and the forks felt like I put honey in them. Out went the Bel-Ray and I now have Honda 5wt. Haven't ridden it yet.
 
Rob578 said:
I found the same goop in mine when I replaced the seals. I went back with Bel-Ray 7wt and the forks felt like I put honey in them. Out went the Bel-Ray and I now have Honda 5wt. Haven't ridden it yet.
Click to expand...

Did you change your springs, also what do you weigh?
 
Rob578 said:
I weigh 190. Haven't changed the springs, need to set the sag.
Click to expand...

Part of the reason the front may have felt like honey is because the rear shock spring is too soft. I thought my forks would never work until I switched to the 5.6 spring on the rear. It put more weight to the front so instead of choppering out and being hard to turn it's balanced now and the front end is tunable.
 
I run 0 wt in my forks. Open or closed! 10wt! Wow. Internal leaks? Iv'e had nothing but GOOD luck with Zokes. I revalve ALWAYS!!!
 
fletchman45 said:
I run 0 wt in my forks. Open or closed! 10wt! Wow. Internal leaks? Iv'e had nothing but GOOD luck with Zokes. I revalve ALWAYS!!!
Click to expand...

The purpose of this thread is to share what works for you. I didn't mean to give the impression that I was dissatisfied with my Zokes in fact I'm not complaining at all and after I finished with the above changes They work almost as well as my GasGas with the LTR re-valved Ohlins front and back. I'll bet Les could make my Zokes better than they are but currently they are very rideable and after an hour of logs and single track I was smiling for the rest of the day. As far as the internal leaks go he did mention the need to lap in some of the valving during the re-valve to correct this. Some may not be as in need as others and lapping may be a formality for them. I closely inspected mine while apart and cleaning and found them to look pretty good.
 
lankydoug said:
Part of the reason the front may have felt like honey is because the rear shock spring is too soft. I thought my forks would never work until I switched to the 5.6 spring on the rear. It put more weight to the front so instead of choppering out and being hard to turn it's balanced now and the front end is tunable.
Click to expand...

Stock is 5.4??
 
lankydoug said:
The purpose of this thread is to share what works for you. I didn't mean to give the impression that I was dissatisfied with my Zokes in fact I'm not complaining at all and after I finished with the above changes They work almost as well as my GasGas with the LTR re-valved Ohlins front and back. I'll bet Les could make my Zokes better than they are but currently they are very rideable and after an hour of logs and single track I was smiling for the rest of the day. As far as the internal leaks go he did mention the need to lap in some of the valving during the re-valve to correct this. Some may not be as in need as others and lapping may be a formality for them. I closely inspected mine while apart and cleaning and found them to look pretty good.
Click to expand...
Got ya! Sounds good to me.
 
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