So I managed to do something that puzzled even the local bike shops; break the steerer tube free from the fork crown. Apparently, you are not supposed to be able to do that. Pretty much everything else on the biike should be snapped and torn before that lets go.
Mine let go.
Other people have had the same experience with that particular fork. It was a Manitou Splice, stock fork on an ‘05 Marin B17.
After going back and forth a bit with Manitou, I ended up with a Manitou Drake, for a price low enough to make me very jealous. The dickering process wasn’t the best, but it ended up with me holding a brand-new, shiny white fork in my hands, saying to myself, “What the heck do I do with this?”
First, I cleaned the old bearings and bearing races. They are low-end WTB races, and the lower bearings are pretty much shot, but I’m going to use them anyway. I did remember to remove the lower bearing race from the old fork with a mallet and a screwdriver before leaving it with the bike shop.
I ran into a small panic when I realized that the lower bearing race seemed to be much too big for the fork. After talking with the bike shop, I realized that the bottom of the steerer tube is actually quite a bit bigger than the rest of the steerer tube, and the bearing race fit perfectly on that. Ye of little faith!
I assembled everything, bearings, spacers, and stem, and marked the steerer tube where it came out of the stem. I disassembled everything, and marked down about 3/8″ to give the tube cap some “squeeze” room.
I took a large tube cutter, the kind that spins round-and-round-the-merry-go-round, and used that cut the steerer tube. Afterwards, I filed down the heavy burs left from the tube cutter with a couple older files. Total time was about 20 minutes. I actually ended up significantly rounding off the end of the steel steerer tube to make it easier to put everything on.
I had to purchase a tube nut, which cost about $3 or so.
Put everything together, screwed on the end cap, connected the cables, and it was good to go.
Lovely ride, and an awesome fork. Adjustable compression on a 140mm fork is the bomb.
(I chose 140mm because it had the closest crown height to the original fork. The original Manitou Splice fork had an unusually high crown height, and I wanted to keep the overall bike geometry as much as possible. Dumb reason to choose 140mm, but it was the same price and I’m very glad for it now. Yay, soft landings!)