Hydrolocked shock

[K5Blazer]

I got around to rebuilding me leaky front shocks and one is hydrolocked. They are Sway away 2.5 14" travel race runners. I bought them used so I think that someone forgot to reset the piston depth in the resiovior when the revalved the shock. I tried to depress the resiovior end cap and couldnt get it to budge and i also tried depressing the shock end cap(cant think of the correct name right now, but the one with seals and junk in it.) Any ideas on what to do? I tried to loosen one of the lines for the resi. but couldnt get it loose, I geuss I could try loosening the shock end cap on the top of the shock.

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[ntsqd]

Stupid Q, but just to be safe you did release all the pressure first?

Not sure how you could get it together w/o having just a little bit of movement.

[John_Bitting]

As Shane posted earlier on another thread.

Contact Mike Arthur @ Super Shocks 909-781-0111

[Ramsey_ElWardani]

It sounds like the Nitrogen gas got buy the reservoir’s separator piston and there was equal pressure on both sides of the separator piston before you opened the Schrader Valve. Now there is pressure behind the separator piston, and opening the shock up without releasing that pressure can be dangerous. One way to confirm this is to depress the shaft all the way in to the shock, and if it gets pushed back out, there is still pressure in the shock body. You will need to release that pressure slowly and carefully by loosening the hose or a by-pass valve SLOWLY.

[kjmiller1]

I think I had the same problem and Ramsey's solution is what fixed it. Just make sure you release it very slowly as mentioned, reseal it with some teflon and wait as long as required to let the teflon dry. I think the reason why this happened was because I had jerry-rigged the reservoir temporarily using a single hose clamp right in the middle, rather than two towards the ends.

[K5Blazer]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I brought the shock with me to work today and we got all the pressure out of it at work. It looks like all of hte pressure bypassed hte dividing piston in the resivour, cause all of the shock fluid was extremely airated. We ended up take the resivour line off the shock and ended up making a huge mess since the tech i work was in charge of pulling the resivour off while i held rags over everything and held the shock. luckily no one go hurt when the hose popped off, but it made a huge mess. Im geussing there was about 60 PSI or so in the shock, after i let the pressure out of the resivour. Now only if the rebuild kit had the correct seal in it, i geuss there were two different designs on the race runners seals.

[curt]

CALL MIKE, before you reinstall. There was a problem with some of the SAW's and he can tell you if yours is one of the problem units...Mikes the best shock guy I've ever talked with, really knows his stuff ...Curt

[K5Blazer]

I ended up going down to Kartek, it turns out I had one shock with a new design dividing piston, and another shock with the old design piston. Hence why one of the shocks had the square cut seals and the other had the o-ring type seals. I geuss the square cut was an old design, that had problems and allowed the nitrogen to seap past the seal thus locking the shock up and causing hte main body to fill up with nitrogen. I ended up gettin an updated dividing piston that worked with the new style seal and put it all back together today, and charged the shocks and they work fine.