[s-cars] Rear brake saga - The Questions have Ended!

[Eric Phillips]

The loctite idea is a good one.

My vocation is as a chemist using gas chromatography - and the gases
used are usually under high pressure.  Teflon tape is a crutch in
cases where a fitting is "almost good enough, but not bad enough to
justify the expense of replacing it."  Being careful with what happens
to the leftovers is a very important part of using it.  I would have
preferred using loctite, though.  I may yet, except that I wonder if
it works when brake fluid is covering all the threads of the
caliper...

On the pedal-bleeding front - how do you get the fluid to flow only in
one direction?  Is there a check valve in-line somewhere?  Let up on
the pedal, the piston in the MC comes back, pulling fluid back from
the caliper and the resevoir?  The stuff from the resevoir is OK, but
pulling it back from the caliper is sort of opposite of what you want,
LOL.

I would have greatly preferred to use your method - it would have been
faster and much less fussy.

Eric

On 2/22/06, Theodore Chen <tedebearp at yahoo.com> wrote:
> eric,
>
> next time, use loctite PST to seal the bleeder screws.  the problem
> with teflon tape is that you wind up with a lot of shredded tape when
> you remove or loosen the screw, and you don't want shrapnel floating
> around in the brake fluid.
>
> i don't use anything special to flush my brakes.  i just put a piece of
> tubing on the bleeder screw and aim it into a jar.  i bleed both calipers
> on one side of the car at a time (first the passenger side, then the
> driver side) by pumping the brake pedal.  pump 8 times, refill MC, repeat
> until fluid coming out is clear.  as long as the bleeder screws aren't
> leaking, no air will get sucked into the calipers when you release the
> pedal, because there will be fluid in the tubing.  i've been doing this
> for years, including on my race cars, and never had any problems getting
> a solid pedal.