I've often wondered why nobody has come up with a solution.
The modern forks work quite well, but if any of you ride in muddy conditions, especially where there's fine sand, or dirt, you can't be happy with the seal's performance. The seals on all of my bikes leak/have leaked at some point. When I had conventional forks with boots, a bad, or leaky fork seal was unheard of.
If somebody could come up with a workable, good looking solution, they'd be rich.

 

Seal savers....



Oh and West.....nice edit you weasel....LOL

Originally Posted by deej
I was going to say that the 70's called and they want their mudflaps back, but my wife loves them sooooooo......LOL

 

Hahaha yeah I forgot about my mudflaps.......didn't think that through very well did I?

 

I have seal savers, but they're not the same as a proper boot.

 

Hmmm...after looking at a few USD forks for a boot issue, I'm thinking the disc rotor looks awfully close to where a boot would be...maybe? It also looks pretty tough to coordinate the boot and fork guard without a bunch of rube goldberg attachments...and yes, I'd think fork guards would still be a good idea even with boots down there. One thing that makes seal scrapers more effective on USD forks compared to conventional forks is that the scraper has gravity assisting it in dropping off dirt, mud, dust, etc. I know from past experiences with many dirt bikes with conv. forks and boots that there still seems to be a bit of crud that packs up in the bottom of the boot despite the breather and drain holes. You generally had to undo the bottom clamp and clean in there after every dirty run anyway or you'd get this buildup. USD scrapers are in a more ideal position to allow everything to run down the leg and be scraped/pushed down the leg away from the seals. And as someone has already said, there's probably a clearance issue under full compression with a boot in place.

 

I agree with TNC. Fork boots never worked that well in the real heavy stuff, mud and water. They had breather holes to keep them from swelling as the forks collapsed. These holes sucked in the mud and water and compacted on top of the seals. With USD forks there is a clearence problem with the rotor as well as the tire. I often removed them from my race bikes.