| The brakes on my car never inspired
much confidence being spongy. It looks like the previous owner had
done some work on them, possibly for the mot and not got all the air
out of the system. I would have used my Eezibleed unit which uses the air pressure from a tyre to push fresh fluid through the system when the caliper bleed screws are undone.
The trouble was I did not have the right sort of cap to fit the master cylinder. So I looked at Andy Rybka's vacuum bleeder arrangement from the Rover 800 group
This can be made from an empty coffee jar with a screw top. The drawing explains everything. Since I did not have an empty jar at the time, I looked again at the Eezibleed kit. This can be made into a vacuum bleed bottle like this:
A piece of black rubber pipe I found fits the caliper nipple and is just the right size to be a tight push fit for the plastic tube from the bottle. (The cap has to be removed from it first). This is the tube that sucks the fluid out of the caliper. The whole arrangement looks like this:
The tyre connector simply pulls out of the black plastic tube for the bottle and the screw cap that was on the white pipe was removed by undoing the union with a spanner. (The whole thing can easily be turned back to a pressure unit by replacing these). A vacuum connection for the unit can be made at the heater valve union. With the engine running on tick over more than enough vacuum is produced to work the bleeder. You need a good length of 5mm pipe so all 4 calipers can be bled. I did not want to run the vacuum from the engine, so I used a Vax cleaner (set up for wet just in case any fluid got sucked into it, it did not). The black tube is fitted into the Vax hose nozzle and Gaffer tape used to seal it together.
Did it work? Well yes quite well, after flushing out all the old fluid from each caliper the brakes now actually feel up to the job. The only thing is the small white tubing on the bottle is a little restrictive, I will make up a new kit using 5mm pipe and a coffee jar for the next time. Don't forget to take the master cylinder cap off and keep it topped up with fluid, oh yes, brake fluid is very powerful paint stripper, so if any gets spilled wash it off with lots of water. Good idea to wash the car afterwards just in case.
Sequence for KV6 800
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