Quote from fastjoe on September 1, 2017, 6:59 pm

Here is a heads up for anyone using a after market fork brace for a GL1500.
Maybe 10K miles ago I put in springs and race tech gold emulator, replaced all the wear parts in the fork while I was in there.
When I got the bike the reason I did this is because the fork barely moved, both fork seals were showing signs of leakage and what was leaking out would have hardly passed for fork oil.
When I drained the oil to rebuild the fork the oil was as bad as I have ever seen. I assumed that the previous owner had never changed it in 125,000 miles.
It was that bad.

The other day I again drained the oil because I changed the ride height of the bike and set the sag which had come out less than optimal during the fork rebuild.
The oil was a very bad again. Stunk too. Took a couple of flushes with solvent then one with ATF to get the residue out. Not that many miles, less than 10k from the last oil change.

Something was definitely wrong. Long story short the aftermarket fork brace that came on the bike was causing the sliders to bind. Reassembled it several different ways and finally left it off.
Bike rides much, much better now that the suspension in the front is working properly.

If you have one of these you might want to consider removing the springs and reassembling the front end with the brace to check that the sliders move freely. You'll need to install the front wheel properly when you do this, fender is probably not necessary, or just leave or take the brace off and see if the front suspension begins to work better when you ride it. If no improvement put it back on. When I first saw the brace I thought I might have a problem because most fork braces do cause binding unless they are custom machined for the fork. However since this was such a popular item with the wing crowd I thought that wings might be the exception. Lesson learned.