My bike brakes have been needing some attention for a while now. Last weekend I decided to make good use of the four day holiday to strip and rebuild the front calipers. I figured this wouldn’t be quite as straight forward as I would hope, but with four days to get stuck in I should have enough time to deal with any issues. How wrong I was.
Bleeding all the old brake fluid out of the system was easy enough, as we removing the calipers from the bike. Not much that can go wrong there to be honest. Completely expectedly, the first caliper pad-pin wouldn’t budge. I’m sure there are better designs for the seating of a pad-pin than my Tokico caliper has. I would ideally like some way to push the pin out from behind. In any case, a whole pile of blow-torch heat later and I managed to free the pin – result! Next step was to pop the two pistons out. Of course, one came out no bother. The other piston was totally stuck and probably the cause of my braking issues. I tried removing the stuck piston with some low pressure air and also by reattaching the caliper to the braking hydraulics. Unfortunately the seal around the piston got damaged (probably when I was blow-torching the pin) and was no longed sealing anything that well.
On to caliper number two and I was instantly defeated by the pin pad. I heated it to red-hot and still I couldn’t convince it to turn. At this point I was very annoyed and three days through the long weekend. So I did the only sensible thing – had a beer and a barbecue.
My only option now was to take the box of caliper bits and replacement seals to a bike shop and get the professionals to do the job. The day after I dropped the box off I received a call saying the brakes were ready to collect. Well, that was two days shorter than me. Bill was for 90 minutes of labour. I wish I could do it that quickly as well.
Fitting the brakes back on the bike should be nice and easy I thought. I’ve bled the brakes plenty of times before I thought. Well, no. One of the calipers would just not stop leaking air. Gah! This got me more and more annoyed so I would do a bit of bleeding, go watch some of the F1 qualifying, go bleed some more air… Eventually I was running low on brake fluid so had to leave and buy another bottle, which led up to dinner time.
Dinner was a useful break from the brakes as when I went back outside I noticed a puddle of brake fluid dripping from the bottom of the caliper onto the shed floor. Hmm, okay, where’s that coming from? I took the caliper off the bike and noticed the inner copper washer sealing the brake line to the caliper was slightly squint. God damnit, all this was just because I hadn’t quite put the hose on properly. If only I’d noticed that sooner. I think instead of getting annoyed I should have sat down and worked out what was actually going on – good advice for most problems.
So now, the bike is still in the shed and actually has pressure in the brake system. I’ve tied the brake lever on overnight to force any more air out and I’ll finish the bleeding tomorrow.
The whole point of doing this myself was to save a little cash. So far I’ve saved nothing and cost myself two weekends. I also had to suffer the horrors of taking a bus to work (another blog about that maybe). I think next time I’ll take the bike to the shop and just pay the bill.
