Many people have innate fears about working on a fork. They seem to think that touching the wrong dial or unscrewing the wrong thread will result in a fountain of oil spurting in their face. Well fear not, in all honesty if you take your time, there’s really not much that can go wrong.

In this video we show you how to change the compression damper on your RockShox fork. If your fork needs some lockout, or you just want an upgrade in performance, then this is much cheaper than buying a whole new fork.

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Removing and fitting the damper is as easy as unscrewing and screwing a thread but you’re likely to go wrong in two places. The first is picking your damper – there are plenty of options for every shock so make sure you pick the right one otherwise you’re scuppered before you begin.

The second is the oil height or oil volume. Forks have a very specific amount of oil in them and if you don’t get this right then the fork will end up not working properly. The easiest way to do this is to completely empty the fork after you have taken the damper out and re-fill it using RockShox’s charts. You can also use a RockShox oil height tool as demonstrated in the video above, this is a cleaner way to do it but it is more fiddly.

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If you’ve sorted this, the rest of the job is a doddle and you’ll be reaping the benefits of your new damper in no time.