Bleeding Hope Hydraulic Disc Brakes
 

Difficulty:
ììì


Time:
30mins



 

If your a budding home mechanic your most likely going to want to bleed your own brakes, then you might like to know how to do it....

Bleeding brakes is a relatively easy thing to do, especially with our good old friends, Hope Brakes. A very simple but reliable piece of kit

Hope Produce an excellent breed kit consisting of an air pressure system for airless brake systems. This is an ideal purchase for regular brake servicing, but for the annual tune up not required.

First things first:

How ever confident you are with brake bleeding, we would recommending clicking over to http://www.hopetech.com and look in their technical pages to download the correct manual for your brake [e.g mini, m4, mono mini, mono m4]

Have a read of the manual and make sure you know what and where all the different parts of the brakes are, and what they do.


Lets not waste anymore time then:

Most people will suggest you remove the brake pads first, personally i've never had any problems with pads becoming contaminated, as long as your careful not to get any oil near the pads or disc rotor. If your worried check the hope manual and remove the pads [a very simple process of removing a couple of clips]

1. On the relevant lever, remove the rectangular master cylinder top cap by unscrewing the two allen key bolts - they are notoriously brittle bolts so if you manage to round them out, use a hacksaw to carefully convert them into screws

2. With the top cap removed, remove the black neoprene seal out of the lever body - you should see brake fluid under this (unless your system is drained...)

3. On the relevant brake calliper find the bleed nipple, remove the black rubber dust cap and add a suitably sized piece of plastic tube onto this running into a container [to catch the drained oil when bleeding].

4. Grab your oil

5. Wrap your lever assembly in a towel or cloth to stop oil dripping down over rotors etc

6. Grab a 10mm spanner and undo the bleed nipple bolt a quarter of a turn

7. If you now carefully and slowly squeeze the lever fully in once or twice you should see the oil start to flow through the tube into your container

8. I would suggest squeezing the lever until the master cylinder is nearly empty of oil, with just a small layer left in the master cylinder -  then start to add fresh oil into the system.

9. Squeeze the lever slowly a few more times whilst keep topping up the master cylinder with new oil to replenish the system with fresh oil and bleed out all the old, possibly contaminated old oil. Remove roughly enough oil to fill half the system, or remove as much as your putting in to keep the new-old oil the same levels.

10. Now tighten the bleed nipple bolt

11. Top the master cylinder up with new oil up to the very top

12. Now very gentle squeeze the lever to push the oil into the system and to remove all the air bubbles - you should be able to see air bubbles possibly coming from the hose into the master cylinder.

13. Keep squeezing gently until now more air is visible coming out from the hose, top up the oil to full and repeat the process [step 12] until your happy there is no air in the system and that the master cylinder is full of new oil.

14. Gently push the neoprene black seal back into the top cap and put the screw/bolts back through the top cap and seal. Align the screws and start to tighten the top cap back onto the lever/master cylinder assembly

15. Before the top cap is tightened fully, gently squeeze the lever once or twice to release any last minute air bubbles and fully tighten the top cap back into place.

If the brake still feels spongy and underpowered repeat the process


Note:
If you manage to completely drain the brake system you will have a pain staking task or repeated bleeding to rid all the air from the system [lots of air gets into the drained system - talking from experience!]