Fork stuck in headset!

crashtestdummy12
crashtestdummy12 Posts: 99
edited December 2008 in MTB workshop & tech
Hi,
I went out for a ride yesterday, and realised that my headset had quite a bit of stiction in it and was quite stiff to turn. Today I decided to strip and rebuild the headset (a recent Hope model), as I have done before, but after I had removed the stem, the fork simply wouldn't budge. Eventually, after recruiting another person (so that's two people hitting it with hammers), I managed to get it so that the top of the steerer tube is parallel to the top of the headset. I can now lift the steerer tube up in the head tube, revealing that the problem is that the spacer/seal jobby that is supposed to simply slide on and off is stuck fast(I can't get a photo of my actual headset onto here, but the item in question is number 7 on hopes diagram). The steerer tube is aluminium so I don't see how it could have seized. The only other thing that I can think of is that the steerer tube could be mis-shapen, but this seems unlikely as it was VERY hard to make it move, even where the stem isn't touching the steerer tube.
Does anybody have any idea what's wrong and/or how I should go about fixing it?
Thanks, Crash.
Headset_expl.gif

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