Fork tube pitting

[Rocketman]

I replaced fork seals over the weekend.  This was due to a combination of corrosion/pitting on the extreme lower end of my fork tubes, and riding some wonderfully smooth roads in Louisiana.  Some of those potholes jarred my teeth loose, and ripped up my fork seals when they hit that pitting.
While we were working on the fork seals, we applied some emery cloth to the pitting, but eventually gave up.  We got it a lot smoother than it was, but not smooth enough.  I'll be working on that till Christmas to get it down far enough to clear the pitting.  Therefore, I was wondering:  Has anyone tried filling the pits rather than "sanding" them down?  Seems like ti would be easier, but I'm not sure if it would work.  I would fill it with some epoxy or whatever, then sand the epoxy down smooth.  Would it stay in the pits, or would it pull loose and create a bigger problem for the seals?

Mark

[Fudd]

I have the same pitting in the same location from riding on the same roads as you.  My attempt to sand them out only resulted in dulling the chrome finish.  After looking at it closely, I decided it would take one heck of a pothole impact to compress the fork pitting just to the dust seal, let alone the main seal.  I decided to make sure there were no protruding sharp points on the pitts and let them go at that.  Also, my seal failed in the middle of its thickness, not on the seal's inside edge as I would have expected, had it failed from ruffness of the fork piston.

The inside wiping portion of the seal is not chewed up at all, so the pitting did not cause my seal's failure.

[The Anvil]

I have the same issue. I emery clothed it smooth like you did and left it, but I had a severe leak for a while. I know what you mean about fork bottoming and that it should need a SEVERE bump, but before I rebuilt the front with Progressive springs and new oil my for was bottoming a LOT. Since the rebuild I can't recall it bottoming once.

My stock springs were also almost an inch shorter than spec so they were definitely tired. But after 13 years on a very heavy bike that's to be expected.