So, you’ll see from the pictures that I’ve added braided stainless lines to the brakes at the end of the leg. I mentioned this somewhere else, but I was afraid of the nylaflow getting UV exposure, and wanted something more durable. You’ll also see that I added a large AL plate to keep the brake from radiating heat onto the leg, I also mention this somewhere else, but I highly recommend it as several Velocitys have had their gear weakened by proplonged exposure to this kind of heating. But mostly I want to talk about bleeding the brakes. What a pain. We’ve tried every auto bleeding system (vacuum and pressure) with limited success. Since we could never really get all of the air out of our system, and could never lock a brake, I did two things. First I removed our parking brake, which never got used and was sort of a pain to setup properly (to actuate in the cockpit), and second I bought an ATS aircraft brake bleeder. We still haven’t come up with a fool-proof system, but this already a big improvement. It attaches to the bleeder with an ingenious slip-over-it-tighten-then-open-the-bleeder function that makes it possible to get a relatively dripless conenction at high pressure with a large pot of brake fluid. This baby can put the kind of pressure on the system that can move fluid fairly rapidly, and I think this is what you want. Then you need to move plenty of fluid, because air entrains the fluid, and if you don’t basically turn over all of the fluid air will just come out of suspension tomorrow. So we rigged my old auto pressure bleeder to the resvoir side of the system by connection a 3/8″-3/8″ pipe union to another bleeder, and connected the pressure pot to that resevoir bleeder to accept the fluid and started pumping. This seems to be working as after flushing a bunch of fluid (and tapping/banging the pedals vigoroursly-you want to do this because the master cylinders capture a lot of air) through the system we were left the next day with only one minor bubble.
ATS Brake Bleeder
New brake lines
Posted By: Brett FerrellFriday March 12th, 2010 at 9:11 PM
[…] See this maintenance article. […]