Hey everyone!

So I noticed a lot of play in my headset today and decided to take it apart to re-grease and generally inspect it.

The bearings seemed all fine (not broken or anything). The steering tube of the fork was though very rusty because it's quite an old bike so I used some sandpaper to get the rust off and after that I re-greased all the parts and put it back together but when I started to tighten the headset cap to get rid of the play in the headset (preload the bearings I guess), the screw bottomed out till the point something would break if I would go any harder on it and there's still a huge amount of play in it. I had the stem loose when I did this and correctly held the fork in place so it couldn't move down at all. I don't think it's caused by the lack of spacers either because there's just about 2-3 mm of room between stem top and fork's steering tube end and it was fine before.

However the "cosmetic" cap of the stem (or headset, idk) had broken off like 3 months before because I had over-tightened it and it was made of plastic so it just popped. Could this be the cause of the play in the headset and should I somehow replace the whole top cap that preloads bearings or is it something else. I'm not even sure how I'm supposed to get the "old" part out of the forks steering tube in the first place. Fork is the RockShox Quadra 21R so quite an oldie. I also had a thought that maybe the headset cap was already integrated with the fork in the first place so I couldn't even replace it anyway but I really don't know.

Also if I'm not mistaken, the fork should hold itself in place after the top bolt is screwed in but in my case the fork would just fall right out even after I had tightened the top cap bolt to place.

As you might see I'm a bit confused what I'm supposed to do next so any help is kindly appreciated.

Thanks!