Bleeding progress

A bit more progress to report, again mainly around the J15’s rebuilt braking system. With the new master cylinders I’m going to have to use a different fluid reservoir. In particular, I need to mount the fluid higher up so as to be sure that it’s downhill into the master cylinder.

The reservoir is shown here in my vice. There are two outlets, one of which is seen at the bottom with the cap on the end of it. However, as the ’07 CBR1000RR has a hydraulic clutch I need an additional outlet. Hence, I drilled a hole in the reservoir, half way up so that the clutch is sacrificed rather before the brakes, and fitted a spigot sealed with a fibre washer. However, I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t going to leak so I stuck a bit of hose on the spigot, filled it with fluid and left it overnight here in the vice.

In the morning, the clutch outlet was fine, although a few drips had got past the brake outlet caps…

So, I needed to get the pedals all working. Of course, one of them is the throttle pedal. Because the pedals are in a new position I need to redo the throttle cable. Unfortunately, I need to fit the cable into the front of the pedal box. That means that the cable I’ve got isn’t long enough! So, I arranged for a chunk of the cable to run outside the cable outer and connected two cables together at this place with a couple of solderless nipples. Here’s the connection between the two cables, along the side of the car inside the sidepod.

One problem I had with the new pedal box is that I needed to use a banjo and bolt to connect the input side of the master cylinders, due to proximity to the inside of the front bodywork. The only problem was that I couldn’t find any banjos that would connect to the sort of flexible hose that connects to the reservoir.

So, I made some.

Essentially, I got the inside of a banjo, removed the olive and nut and welded that to another push-fit spigot. Again, I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t going to piss fluid out all the time. So, I filled one up with fluid and, again, left it over night to see if the fluid leaked out. Again, it didn’t. 🙂 As before, here it is sitting in the vice waiting to leak.

Of course, it’s a tough life in Tim’s garage. I have to keep going without a rest. Luckily, these days I can use a laptop to watch the GP practice as you can see. Note that you can see both the Beeb’s video feed but the timing screens provided by the FIA. All home comforts, you see!

So, with an idea how to actually connect it all up I installed the reservoir, making sure that I got it as far up as I could without bashing into the bodywork. I then installed the reservoir to master cylinder pipework and also connected up the outlets.

This left it looking like this. Then I bled all the systems again. If I’m honest I’m left with brake systems that don’t feel as good as I’d like, in particular because there seems to be a bit too much travel at the top of the pedal movement before it firms up. Hopefully this is just because there’s a bit of air still in the hoses which will collect somewhere so that I can bleed it out.

So, I’m pretty much back to where I started this latest escapade. Hopefully in the next couple of days I can do something new! That’d be nice!

3 thoughts on “Bleeding progress”

  1. Hello Tim
    Going back to my query on brake discs last month I have sorted out the front ones but would welcome the RD part number for the rear discs if its not too much trouble. Cannot seem to make too much sense of the RD catalogue. I am intending to use the HiSpec two pot handbrake calipers and am having the same space problems that you encountered.
    Regards David

  2. David,

    Sorry, didn’t see this comment lurking. I can’t seem to find my carefully squirrelled away copy of the ref number! However, if you phone RD then they’re the discs that they use with the Sierra drum -> disc conversion kit. With the Sierra hubs you have to turn the hubs down slightly so that they’ll fit in the discs. However, the Fiesta style hubs as JP uses seem to be fine.

    Tim

  3. Tim
    Many thanks, I seem to be making some progress on this but its the usual kit car build business of two steps forward and one bachwards!
    Regards David

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