Fork disassembly

Hi I’m in the process of pulling my forks apart. I have the cartridge out and the circlip out of it but no matter what I try can’t get the compression valve out the bottom of cartridge. It feels like there is a ridge on valve thats catching on circlip groove. We tried heatgun and tapping rebound rod to knock it out but no good

Does anyone are any ideas? PLEASE

Stress has been averted.. we got a socket that was very close to the diameter of inside of cartridge and then wrapped it with 400g wet n dry paper and smoothed/lapped the exit part of inside cartridge, just below the circlip groove. Got the valve out. Yay. Wondering what caused the problem, bottoming out perhaps?
No matter, onwards

Good to hear you got over that hurdle.

Having not dismantled the forks before I wasn’t sure if I was about to bugger up the stuck valve in trying to get it out myself. But after that the only issue was trying to remember the assembly sequence.

As the Racetech book preaches; cleanliness, cleanliness