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I bought a 60mL syringe from the vets for $5 and went down to bunnings and 4m of 5mm clear hose and a short joiner (didn’t need it but just in case) and headed out to the shed on the rainy Friday night with a cold 6pack. I spoke to my mechanic and he suggested I use the syringe to suck the fluid out through the bleeder and top up the MC as I was going and thought I’d try that since it sounded straight forward. It was very straight forward and probably only took 2 beers to get it done and what a difference! I use to be able to press the rears pretty far down but now the range of movement seems to be about 3” so it’s going to make a huge difference! I’ve left an occy strap tightened over the front lever to force any remaining bubbles up but it feels much better also.
To give some background, as mentioned previously I’m new to riding and this is my first proper bike so I’m pretty clueless about maintenance and set up but I’m learning step by step . I knew I wasn’t happy with the front and rear brakes and I’d learnt the basic ongoing maintenance so I wanted to learn how to maintain the brakes next.
I’d ridden Ben’s 450x and discovered what front brakes should be like when I squeezed his as hard as I normally squeeze mine and nearly went over the bars! The rear brake had a couple of problems – I thought the pedal had been adjusted all the way down but it was still resting high and against the clutch cover so I had to really reach plus I couldn’t feel them under my boots but thought I’d just have to get a new pedal and learn to feel it more when on them.
Before my last ride I took a closer look at the rears (after learning it was $160 for a new pedal) and discovered it had 2 adjusters, one for engagement position and one for rest position and the latter was way out and causing the problem. I adjusted the position and they were much easier to get on but I still couldn’t feel them and had to stomp the crap out of it to lock it up compared to other blokes that were just sliding into corners so I was really keen to fix it up.
When I took the MC cover off it was very nearly empty. I was pretty shocked but it explained why they were so bad! I stuffed up a touch right at the end of doing the fronts by letting the MC get too low and although they feel much better to squeeze I think I’ll do them again after I get a ride in this w/e. The rears were much easier to do yourself because you’re in reach and view of the MC and bleed nipple from the one position though the cylinder is small so I overflowed it several times.
I was hoping to notice when the new fluid started coming into the tube but it looked just like the old fluid
I probably put 200mL into it and called it quits because it seemed plenty and I didn’t want to run out and not get the rears done.I noticed that bubbles seemed to constantly flow into the hose when the valve was open and these would only stop when I really, really tightened the bleeder.
Thanks for the advice guys
ah… serenity now
Cheers for that!
do you have to use the url=….? I tried putting the address in the url tabs, the ebay tabs and even just by themselves and it was crapping itself!
