The first thing you must do is seriously question the condition of the inside of the upper tubes as upon this rests all hope of getting them to seal with any hope of reliability. If they are anything less than polished like a mirror with no pits or other marks you are pretty well wasting your time and money fitting new seals.
That said I understand that the Panther mob can be helpful.
I have been pondering this very problem for some time now as the top tubes on my kit-o-bits are pretty well scrap, not only are they rust pitted inside but they ‘aint very straight either! The chances of obtaining imperial tube of the right size in this benighted metricated country seem to be slim. (Ponder on this: The millimetre is about the same size as the human flea – and about as much use…)
The Oleomatic forks as a concept are an attractive idea and it’s a shame that they were made by the bean counters not the engineers because they finished up being rubbish. I rather suspect that not only has the inside of the tube been designed to rust but the material is not quite up to the job either and bends when confronting a pothole resulting in the tube momentarily going oval thus increasing the risk of deflation.
Short of replacing the top tubes or having the bores of the existing ones hard chromed and honed to size I can offer little succour. In the long term I think that I’ve come up with a design that eliminates the sliding seal entirely, requires a minimum of alteration to existing parts while leaving the outside untouched. There is a quantity problem regarding the material I’d choose to use for the seals, (Would sir like more than one 45 gallon drum?), and there would also be some tooling and testing required so it would need a fair number of people to be keen to make it worth the effort and spread the cost. I have some drawings, do you go to any London section meetings?
If you wanted to go really off the wall, well you are a Scott owner, I suppose you could always disguise a small compressor as a second Pilgrim pump. Attached to the engine and piped to the forks it’d keep you floating like them old ’60’s Citroen cars!
.
