I love to teach my son how to ride and repair stuffs the old fashion way. Here I will share some of our cheap DIY projects and repairs. I will also share some of my experience as a biker and as a pro mechanic. I am not a mechanic anymore but I still do repairs but mostly for my own machineries and this is why I try to keep everything easy and cheap. I also don't race anymore but I still love riding up the mountains where there is little or no help and all I can rely on is my small tool pouch and my monkey repair skills to bring me home whenever my bike or my friends bike breaks down.

If you are a tech-wiz or some kind of high-tech repair guru who likes spending too much $$$s buying stuffs and spends most of your time at a coffee shop posing your best biker battle gear clown costume and talking how great a biker you are then THIS IS NOT FOR YOU... Here we seriously ride our bikes and we try to keep everything simple, easy and cheap. Most of what I will share here are intended for riders who usually break their bikes to peices and may not be needed by other bikers.

I will also be sharing some cheap ways how I repaired my cars and computers. And for laughs, I will also add some weird / funny / odd stuffs that I or we did that worked and didn't work. Sorry about this blog's style, set-up or whatever you may call it, I'm an old school biker and its easier for me wrenching cars and bikes than typing on my keyboard...

Friday, October 1, 2010

Spongy feel brake/clutch

Giving my bike's clutch lever some karate chops...

This is based on my experience again... My bike is fitted with very powerful brakes and a very soft clutch. We use only one finger on the levers BUT before I have experienced that my brakes was not working properly and it wont do a full lock and I have to pump the lever with 2 fingers to make the brakes lock. The master, hose, calipper/ clutch master, hose, clutch slave cylinder has no air inside and was bled well but my brakes and clutch levers are still stiff. I tried every technical thing that I can think of and even bought all the brakes and clutches inner rubbers and was about to do a full replacement(o/h) but an International A rider stopped me and told me that he'll try to repair the problem. All the kid did was to do quick karate chops ( about 80 to 100 times per lever) and after that my bike was ready to rock. His style was akward but it worked. He told me that since we dont use our bikes everyday, the master cylinder's rubber often gets stucked and cannot do full strokes. It is like pumping tire air pump doing small strokes. If you do a full pump stoke on a tire air pump, more air will be delivered...



I still do karate chops (50 to 100) on my levers everytime I feel that the masters are sticking and it always works for me. I regularly change the oil on my brake and clutch unit every 3 months and do a full o/h every year and I still experience problems... what more if your unit is not regularly being serviced??? I dont know if this will work for your bike but for me I do karate chops even on my street bikes and it works.
Posted by iWrench at 2:21 AM

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