in closing the seat, it moves a little over 14mm (by the seal wear marks on the piston rod) but I can compress it to ~20mm (in a padded vice).
So, our damper has a 20mm stroke and is using about 14-15mm or ~75% of the total lift capacity.
Before we start looking for a replacement lift cylinder, I would like to try an experiment with one of the Forza riders with a bad damper....
if your damper absolutely will not support your seat, you qualify!
but this person should be willing to use tools and should have someone available to assist them.
The reason I suggest this is my damper is working great, but it didn't always.
Right after I stripped the body panels off the Forza, my damper wouldn't hold the seat up. But it would before! During that teardown using the service manual, I had started to remove the seat and had loosened all the hinge bolts, but got stopped dead by the lift damper....the manual said to remove the ball from seat hinge with a wrench.....I didn't have a thin wrench and stopped there (another rider mentioned later that the socket could just be popped off the ball but I didn't know that at the time).
Anyway after I reassembled the bike, the seat wouldn't stay up. Having loosened the seat hinge bolts, I knew where to look first.
With the help of a friend, I loosened all the seat hinge bolts, then he lifted up on the rear of the seat and I pushed DOWN on the front of the seat (with the damper still attached) and with it held in this position I retightened all the hinge bolts.
The damper again supported the seat.
So my damper failure was self induced and was cured by applying a little bias to the hinge components (there are 4 parts to this hinge, not the two piece hinge we're accustomed to seeing.)
Hinge A (4) bolts to the frame.
Hinge B (3) is secured to Hinge A by two pivot bolts (27).
Seat hinge (1) is bolted to Hinge B (this is the metal nose of your seat to which the damper attaches).
Hinge cover (5) secures the seat to this whole mess.
any takers?
