Spring noise..

Cade Sutton

A few people out there have commented that they can hear a strange groaning or vibration from their various spring lever machines when operating the lever.

I noticed a small amount of noise from one group in the L2, and a fraction more in the other. This did not bother me in the slightest, but I was interested to find a cause and remedy.

Reiss has mentioned in the past that the seals moving accross the surface of the bore can set up a tiny vibration - another good reason to correctly lube your machine with Loxeal silicone. This is the first step to getting rid of the noise, but may not solve it entirely.

The second step (with the group apart, next time you replace seals or relube it) is to apply some silicone grease to the 'valleys' between coils at the base of the spring, where the last coils actually or nearly touch eachother or the washer they sit on. When the vibration is set up, these areas can buzz together and make the noise you hear. The grease acts as a buffer between these tight gaps and eliminates the sound.

Job done. Make sure you go a fraction further up than appears necessary... the spring is less compressed while you are working on it than it will be once installed and the lever worked.

If you feel like overkilling it to be absolutely certain, I see little or no harm coming from a (sparing) wipe of silicone over the entire (reachable) spring area. At the very least it will help prevent corrosion in the long term. Reality is the vibration may still be there at lowish frequency but it's only where the coils can touch that there is potential for the (more apparent) high freq. sound to propagate.

Lever operation on my machine is now completely free of any such noise. Good luck out there :-)

Cade Sutton

I've added a pic as a guide to the areas you should grease highlighted in pink. It doesn't need to be much, just enough to create the buffer and not make a mess. I used a bamboo skewer to get into the tight bits.