Bleeding The Shark

Last week, I was stupid. This week, I was merely unlucky. It’s winter in Massachusetts, and we just had a blizzard, so even though I had installed the gas tank in the ’79 Euro 635CSi, and got the exhaust back in, it’s not like it’s going anywhere. It would be an act of automotive violence to let the Shark out of the garage and drive it on roads soaked with enough salt to rust steel wheels in real time; I’d have the ASPCS on my butt.

Besides, with the car still up on the mid-rise lift, I could hear it begging me to continue working on it. 

The obvious next step was to do a full fluid change, beginning with the brakes. This is the perfect job to attack in a cold garage; you can slip in there for fifteen minutes and then bug out if you want. The first night, all I did was pull off the left front wheel. The next night, I hooked up the equipment. Only on the third night did I settle in for a good bleeding.

As you probably know, there are four basic ways to bleed brakes. You can enlist a spouse to sit in the driver’s seat and push the pedal while you close and open each bleed valve. (It’s 40ºF in the garage. I am not going to ask Maire Anne. There are many areas where you can spend a spouse’s goodwill; this ain’t one of them.)

Instead, you can use a pistol-grip gun that sucks the fluid out through the bleed valves. Or you might use the old Gunison EZBleed that pressurizes the brake reservoir with air from the left front tire—and I like using the Gunison when I only need to bleed the brake at one wheel. But with each of those methods, you need to stop and refill the reservoir. If you want to run a lot of fluid through the system because you have to do all four brakes, or you don’t know how long it’s been since the fluid was changed, the Motive power bleeder (or equivalent) is quite efficient, because the same canister that pressurizes the system is also an enormous reservoir, holding two quarts of brake fluid.

First, let me say that I hate all of these methods.

As longtime Roundel readers surely know, I hate the smell and feel of brake fluid. Really. It reminds me of urine in an enclosed space on a hot day. And it’s not like dealing with your children’s diapers, where you grow to tolerate it because it’s your child; I don’t feel any more intimacy with and tolerance for the brake fluid from my Shark or from the 3.0CSi I’ve owned for nearly 30 years than I do for that from a friend’s car. So I endure it, but even saying, “It’s the perfect job to attack in a cold garage,” I don’t look forward to it.

At least the cold keeps the smell down.

So with the Motive hooked up and pressurized, I bled the left front wheel: top nipple first, put the hose on the nipple, stick the other end in the used-brake-fluid receptacle, crack open the bleed valve with the 7-mm wrench, count to 100—everyone knows that all bad brake fluid comes out in the first 100 seconds—verify that fluid is coming out the end of the hose, then move to the middle inside nipple, then the middle outside. Then check the fluid level in the Motive.

It was a little low.

The last thing you ever want to do with one of these is run it empty, as it will put so much air into the lines so quickly that you’ll have to bleed the brakes five times to get it all out. No problem; I always have a supply of brake fluid in the garage. I don’t race, I don’t do driving schools anymore, I don’t even drive all that hard on the street, so I just use DOT-3 stuff ’cause it’s cheap. (Yeah, yeah, back off—you try keeping eleven cars on the road.) But after looking around the garage for ten minutes, to my surprise, I couldn’t find any new brake fluid.

This is starting to sound like last week, isn’t it?

Okay, I learned my lesson last week. Stop right now and just go to Autozone and buy brake fluid. So I did. However, they were out of the economy-size 32-ounce jugs (I’m probably the only guy who ever buys these, and I must have depleted their global stock), so I bought two one-quart bottles. I got home, cracked open the Motive, opened one of the bottles, peeled off the foil seal, poured the fluid into the reservoir, and was about to tighten the top and move on to the right front wheel when I looked inside the Motive.

The brake fluid in the reservoir was dirty—not bottom-of-a-toolbox-had-been-dumped-in-it dirty, but old-brake-fluid dirty.

Was it like this before? Had I somehow previously accidentally filled the Motive from a container I thought was new, but actually held used brake fluid, or did I just pour a new quart that was somehow contaminated into it—or did it get dirty some other way? Don’t know.

Well, this is a drag. All I could do was dump the fluid out, clean the reservoir, and refill it. Since brake fluid is hydroscopic—it absorbs water—you don’t want to clean it with water; you want to clean it with brake fluid. But then I realized that I only had one other quart, and if I used some of that quart to clean the reservoir, then I might not have enough left to bleed the brakes.

So I got a funnel and a paper towel and strained the brake fluid out of the Motive into a clean glass container. The towel seemed to strain it nicely; what was in the glass container looked very clean. I then used that fluid to swish out the inside of the Motive, mopping it out with paper towels.

Yes, you read that right: I, who loathe the smell and feel of brake fluid, was straining it through a filter and mopping it up with paper towels. Imagine my full connection with the legendary Hack Mechanic Buddha at this moment.

When I was absolutely convinced that the Motive’s reservoir was clean, I poured more of the filtered fluid into it, disconnected the Motive’s cap from the Shark’s brake-fluid reservoir, put the cap over the dirty fluid container, and pumped fluid through the hose and the cap to make sure there wasn’t any muck left in there. When that came out clean, I hooked everything back up, poured the remaining quart of fresh fluid into the Motive, verified that it was clean—it was—and began again. Obviously, I first re-bled the left front wheel to make sure that any snot got flushed out.

Well, I thought, that was gross. But I recovered quickly. I moved on to the right front, then the left rear, and finally the right rear. Okay, home stretch; finish this, and you don’t have to smell brake fluid again for a while—at least not on this car.

But then, as is so often the case, as I was climbing over the prison fence, the taste of sweet freedom in my mouth, the guard dogs bit my ankle and dragged me back down. I checked the brake-fluid stream coming out of the right rear caliper’s bleed nipple, as I always do, and saw that almost nothing was coming out. I rechecked the Motive. Yup, full. Yup, pumped up to ten or fifteen pounds of pressure. I rechecked the bleed nipple. Yup, fully open. Just a trickle.

Damn.

This is a symptom of the rubber hose between the caliper and the body of the car being old, swelled, and not letting fluid through. Changing that hose isn’t terribly difficult, but it’s false economy, even for me, to change only one—you replace all of them at the same time.

Which means I now look forward to the joy of doing this all again—soon. Did I mention how much I hate the smell and feel of brake fluid?—Rob Siegel