How To Replace Fork Seals on a 2010 Ducati Multistrada 1200

Leak-free fork seals on your Multistrada 1200 is key to riding safety.

A leak this bad requires swift action.

Fork seals are a frequent failure point on the second-generation Ducati Multistrada. To increase your riding time while decreasing the load on your wallet, it can be advantageous to learn how to replace these parts yourself.

The Multistrada’s occasional tendency to venture off-road increases the general wear on the seals, as well as ups the amount of dirt forced passed them. The front fender also does a poor job of protecting the seals, which allows road debris to easily tarnish them.

Long travel suspension is always more susceptible to seal leakage.

These machines were equipped with either Marzocchi or Ohlins forks. We’ll be discussing seal replacement on the Marzocchi version. Before tackling this job, you’ll want to secure all the recommended parts and tools listed below:

The first step in this job is to lift the front of the bike off the ground. I’ve referenced a head lift stand in the list above, but this stand requires additional modification to get it to work for the Multistrada (see video below for details). The biggest challenge of lifting a Multistrada is that a regular motorcycle front stand won’t raise it high enough off the ground to remove the forks.

You have to get creative to achieve adequate floor-to-bottom-of-fork clearance. I stuffed some boards underneath the front stand so that it would sit four inches higher. This gave me enough clearance to remove the front wheel and slip the forks out of the bottom triple clamp.

Note the improvised front stand lift.

You’ll also need to remove the front “beak” and side fairings so that you can access the upper and lower triple clamp bolts so the fork legs can be pulled out. In my experience, removing the fork legs from the triple clamps required tapping the top of the fork cap with a wooden dowel and a hammer. They require a slight force to be pushed out of the clamps.

Fork leg properly secured by way of soft jaws.

The Marzocchi upside-down forks have a relatively simple design, employing old-school damper rods. There weren’t any “gotchas!” upon disassembling the forks aside from the fork cap requiring a 3mm split pin spanner wrench to unscrew it (see tool list above).

Always take pictures to help you remember the parts removal order.

I recommend refilling the forks using the oil height method over the oil volume method. Ducati recommends a fork oil height 104mm which comes out to be approximately .75 liters of fluid per fork leg. Fork oil height can easily be measured with the syringe tool included in the fork service tool kit by Traxxion Dynamics (see tool list above).

Fresh oil going in. Remember to set the fork oil height!

Follow along in the video below to see each step of the fork seal replacement process:

Fork seal replacement for a 2010 Ducati Multistrada

2 Responses

  1. Ryan

    Have you come across any resources for doing this on the 2010 multistrada 1200s touring ?

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