I still maintain that insect remains are the main reason most fork seals begin to leak. The insects' shells are hard and sharp. They slice seals.
I'm gonna have to stick with Ofreen on this one. While dust, rocks and other road debri do attack the sliders, bug shells are also on the top of the list of oil seal killers.
On every slider type fork, you have two kinds of seals, Oil and Dust. The gators are Dust seals; intended to keeps the dirt, rocks and bugs off of the soft chrome of the sliders where they can sometimes sink in or deform the metal enough that it causes damage to the oil seal. When they did way with the gator style boots, they simply used a smaller dust seal cap that cleaned off the slider prior to it's going though the oil seal; the smaller caps, over the years, have theselves gotten smaller and smaller to the point that you can barely seem them any more.
The down fall of each is an follows:
With the Gators, dust will still collect inside of the boot, eventually wearing out the oil seal.
With the smaller caps, rock, bugs and the like are still going to hit your sliders causing damage, eventually wearing out the oild seal.
That's why, with modern bikes, you see that there is a little extra protection from the fenders. They flare out near the sliders to shield off the rocks and bugs before they hit. The newer bikes still have the smaller dust caps, they are just not as big as our bikes since they have the help from the fenders.
ANYWAY, getting back to the origanal question of this post: Yes, you can take the Gators off,
BUT, if you don't replace them with the smaller style dust caps, you are going to become our new resident expert on changing out fork seals because you'll be doing it all the time.
Personally, I kinda like the retro look of the gators. That being said, you;re not going to find a set of them being put on my bike.
