About a week ago, I came home through the garage and gave the front brakes a glance, on a whim. At that moment, I noticed a small pool of fluid around the front right caliper’s banjo bolt. This particular connection had given me trouble in the past, and my method of torquing it to GUTENTIGHT apparently didn’t work. Although the leak was very slight, and who knows what really caused it, I made up my mind on what to do. And that’s when things got expensive, rather quickly.
The brakes on this bike have been a nightmare. There’s always something. I changed the lines, the calipers, the master cylinder, and the master cylinder’s double banjo. Over time, I ended up bleeding over a liter and a half of fluid through it. Figured if I went this far, I might as well give it one more push. So instead of just changing the right caliper’s crush washers, I decided to redo all remaining banjo bolts with titanium ones. This meant draining the system and having to a full bleed job. I also took the opportunity to step up the brake fluid as well, more on that in a bit.
Here are the new titanium banjo bolts. 3 are pictured, but I actually had to buy 4. I accounted for the front 2 calipers and the rear caliper, but forgot about the rear master cylinder…
One of them installed:
My homemade reservoir, made out of tygon tubing and a brass plug, worked well in the rear. But, following the theme, I decided to go with something more upscale. I bought this HRC (Honda Racing Company) reservoir kit from the U.K.
Basically the same thing as what I had on there, but more authentic. More for show than anything, since I rarely ever use the rear brake.
Now as for the brake fluid, I went with the hyper exotic Castrol SRF. Arguably the best brake fluid, and better be for its insane price.
I did a good amount of flushing and bleeding… You can see the lingering amounts of the old ATE Super Blue fluid collecting at the bottom.
All in all, I had bled in roughly 12 fluid ounces of the Castrol SRF, which is about 0.35 liter. At $75 a liter, this translates to having used $26 just to get the SRF into the system. And $26 is still more than the $15-20 a liter of ATE Super Blue costs… This is why you should never add things up, sometimes ignorance is bliss.
If the front brake’s lever ends up turning to mush, or another leak develops somewhere… I honestly don’t know what else to do. I’ve done literally EVERYTHING. WORK ALREADY!!!
*waits for results*