Front fork differences. Whats the deal?

[Guest]

Hopefully one of you guys can help me out. I'm restoring a 79' GS750 and when I took the front fork legs apart I noticed that the pipes that slide into the stanchions and screw into the bottom of the fork tubes are different. One has two holes on the bottom opposite each other, and the other has four holes on the bottom. Luckily I had an extra fork leg and when I took that one apart, it too had four holes on the bottom. Am I good to go with the four hole pipes? Or are the two hole pipes what I should be using. Aside from the # of holes, they are identical.

The reason I have three fork legs is because I had a stanchion that was slightly bent so I bought another off EBAY. When I compared the newly purchased one with the one I previously had, I noticed that the grooves on the bottom were in a slightly different location. I am assuming this shouldn't affect performance at all but maybe I'm totally wrong about that.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


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[The Falconer]

And the Stanchions.
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[RichDesmond]

Those are your damper rods. As the name implies, they are what provide your damping. The larger holes in the bottom are compression, the smaller holes further up are rebound.
I don't know which ones are stock on your bike. It's also possible that the one with four compression holes has been modified, if you use Race-Tech emulators the instructions have you drill out the existing compression holes to a larger diameter and also (sometimes) add more. The idea being to make it so that they do almost nothing and the emulator takes over the compression damping function.

There's more differences in those damper rods than the number of holes. The sealing ring at the top looks different, and the taper at the very bottom doesn't seem the same. Those things matter, and so you really need to use the right damper rod for the fork tubes that they came out of.