Contributed by Philip Darnall

I disliked the soft springs in the front forks of my ZR-7. Nobody made a replacement spring for the ZR-7 that I could find. So I went ahead and perform surgery on the forks and made my own parts.

I took a 2" long PVC Schedule 40 end-to-end connector and cut it into half. This gave me two 1" spacers for each fork. I removed the fork caps with a socket wrench. (Make sure that you have backed off the pinch bolts or the caps will never come off!) Once the caps were off, I pulled out the factory metal spacer. It is about 6" long and made of thin steel. I wanted to get a look at the spring and other goodies in the fork, so I needed to fish out more parts.

I made a simple hook out of a handy coat hanger. Reaching down into the fork about 8" I pulled up the spring. The factory setup had a real nice metal washer/spacer that sat between the spring and the main spacer tube. I took the spacer/washer off and let the spring fall back down into the stanchion tube. The spring had a nice lip on the top edge where the metal washer/spacer sat. So I dropped the PVC spacer into the fork.

I took my hook and made sure my custom spacer was fully seated on the spring. Next I dropped the factory washer/spacer on top of the PVC spacer. Then in went the original 6" metal spacer. I tried to put the caps back on.

Their was no way that I could compress the spring enough to screw the cap back on. I pulled the PVC spacer out and cut it down by 1/4" and put everything back together. This time the cap went on with a minimum of cussing!

I repeated the same steps for the other side.

Oh what a difference a small spacer makes. My ZR-7 sits up much higher now with the extra preload. When I sat on the bike (post modification) the fork sagged down about 3/4" at the most. The old setup would drop down about 2"! I could slam on the brakes and the front wouldn't dive near as bad as the original setup.

With the bike riding higher and diving less I could last longer on the ride home. My hands didn't go numb in the first ten minutes.

Total cost for the modification was under one dollar.