polishing fork tubes

anyone know of a good way to remove the coating that is on the lower fork tubes?...i have been using a dremel with a 520 polish bit and it works great on just about everything else, but it just burns and stinks on the tubes....i resorted to light sanding with 100 grit and then hitting it with the dremel...its working, but the tight spots are gonna be a pain....what did they put on them factory? clear coat?....any help or ideas would be appreciated.........thanks, keith...

When I did mine I removed the clear coat with some Dupli-color paint stripper. Worked great. I then followed it up by wetsanding up to 2000 grit. At the time I never had a bench grinder so I polished it by hand and used a dremel for the tight spots. I have a bench grinder now with polishing wheels so I may try that over the winter.

If it's factory clearcoat, all that is is a plastic coating. Paint stripper from any hardware store will strip it off whithin a couple minutes then you can polish. No need to even sand. I did mine back in about 1986 on the KZ650 and it still looks great. If you have the black forks, that's another story. It's like a powder coat and extremely hard to get off. The KZ1000 after 80,000 miles on the highway, the black was all chipped up. I finally sanded and polished, but it took hours and hours of hard work. I hate to modify anything so I don't particularly care for the polished forks when they were black, so if I need to ever change the seals, I'm going to powder coat the legs black again while I'm at it.

thanks guys....paint stripper it is....i knew there had to be a better way!!!

Yes,it IS a lot of work.
Paint stripper,and a lots of beers...er,I mean,hours of polishing!

A lot of diffrence there!

I showed a friend of mine how much better my polishing wheel was than him doing the polishing by hand. He went home and built him a polisher. Roy

Sandy wrote:

Yes,it IS a lot of work.
Paint stripper,and a lots of beers...er,I mean,hours of polishing!

sandy,
bike work and beer go hand in hand..that is a given...!!!!

Wow, I need to do that with mine. Do you re-coat it after polishing it? How hard is it to maintain after doing all that work?

drmadd95 wrote:

Wow, I need to do that with mine. Do you re-coat it after polishing it? How hard is it to maintain after doing all that work?

Well,actually,those fork lowers aren't on my bike,but I DID do the same thing to the ones I have on there...and no,I didn't coat them.
I just wipe them down with metal polish from time to time,and all is good.
I'll see if I can find a pic of the ones I have on my bike(the factory ones.)

The ones in the pic above are from the ZRX parts that I have.And yes,it was a lot of work.

Here's the factory fork lowers...

(and 4 years later,they still look like this)