Fork Emulators

Installation (Dec. 2014):

Purchased the Harley knock-off emulators a while ago, waited until the riding season was over to install.

Raised the front of the bike with a hydraulic jack under the engine, then braced with a piece of wood under the frame once the front wheel was off.

Removed the forks from the bike without removing the spring hoping that it would keep the damper rod from turning while I undid the allen bolt at the bottom. Worked for one, had to use the broom-handle technique for the other. The oil that came out was rather black.

Based on the collective wisdom of the SVRider forum, and one particularly amusing and lengthy thread (FAQ: The Final Skinny on drilling Damper Rods), I enlarged the 4 existing compression damping holes to 11 mm dia., did not drill any additional holes, and sealed up the rebound damping hole with JB-Weld. This should allow the use of thinner oil and I went with 10W and two turns of preload on the emulators.

Measured the maximum fork travel as 110 mm. Maybe the 120mm in the Suzuki SV650S specs includes a goodly amount of top-out-spring compression.

Emulator Spring:

The little spring which presses down on the pop-off-valve has 8 turns, a free length of 26mm = 1.024", OD equal to 8.5mm = 0.335" and Wire Dia of 1.2mm = 0.047". According to The SpringStore, the calculated spring rate 37 lb/in.

Sag:

As purchased, front end sag on my SV650S was 46mm with rider which I thought was too much. The height of the emulators is 14mm and I installed them without changing the spacer, so sag is now reduced to 10mm unladen and 32mm laden, pretty well perfect. This made it a smidgen harder to start the fork cap bolt into its thread.

Evaluation:

Paid attention to front suspension on the first Spring ride, now there is perceptible, usable damping on low speed bumps, which keeps the wheel in contact with the road in a bumpy turn, and the blow-off valve limits the harshness of high-speed compression damping.