How To: Adding Grease Ports...

arrows pointing out grease ports

In an effort to minimize service time- Alot of the new frames out have grease ports for the bearings. This is great! Most of them seam to be on the lower portion of the swing arm by the bottom bracket where things get the most trail crap. I was up in Whistler a few years ago with my Intense 5.5, something felt sticky and it turned out my lower bearings where totally rusted and seized. No one in town had any bearings and I ended up just blasting them with cleaner and trying to get as much grease in as I could. Once I got home I found that this was a major complaint for alot of owners.

Most (all?) motocross swing arms have grease ports. Growing up everybody called them 'zerk fittings' and when I called around some shops, I got alot of 'Huhs?' 'Whos?' and 'Whats thats?'. So it just seamed that I should go to the source- Intense. Santa Cruz is using zerk fittings- these are the kind that are on all cars to grease the suspension arms. Turns out 'Zerk' became the generic term such as Kleenex.

A zerk consists of a nipple that the grease gun hangs onto and forces it's juice into, that then pushes the old grease out of the bearing. Really messy but way better than having to tear it all apart. Intense uses a flat type grease port that requires a special grease gun that you need to push down on to get the grease in. Fortunatly Pedro's makes one and I use their Bio-Grease.

these ports are tiny!

The next thing to get was the proper bearings. Stock Enduro bearings have covers on both sides of the bearings. They will not let the old grease to push out. The right bearings have a hard cover on one side only and allow the grease to push through.

I had found a few internet posts about people making the leap.

So- Yes, You have to drill holes in your frame AND figure out if there is any place that will need to be sealed up.

My frame has a huge gap area where the pivot shell and seat tube gather. I could fit my pinky around- so this is when I needed to come up with an idea of what to plug the hole with. Everyone seamed to be using some kind of two part glue and having a piece of something as a backing. This sounded stupid and runny- I came up with using two part auto metal like JB Weld. It is always by the auto parts store register if you now what I mean. So I went about making a batch and filling in the gap. After it hardened, I could file away the excess and make it nice and smooth.

you can still see the seat tube peaking thru

I then found the desired locations for the ports to go and thus drill points. Marked and drilled- the ports went in smooth with just a light tap from my dead weight hammer.

underside of BB/Pivot Shell

underside of lower swing arm shell

Now the fun part- I suppose I should have mentioned earlier- You must take your old bearings out first stupid. But you knew that! OK so I suck at replacing press fit bearings and ended up having a local shop use there über press kit. Fine and done. I decided to pre-grease the bearings before they went in just to make sure there was plenty going on to start.

Now it was time to put it all back together. It should be mentioned that I did this over winter. It took a REALLY long time to get the grease ports.

After two years of adding the ports, I can say this is how all frames should be set up. The grease turns into a nice barrier to the elements and my swing arm always feels smooth. The only complaint is that I have to remove the front bolt to my shock to get to the swing arm port- the new Intense frames have a redesigned lower link that allows easy excess to the ports. This is a minor issue and can be resolved by upgrading to a the new box link.

Now go kill your warranty!