Bleed Brakes on Mountain Bikes with Hytes System

Video Transcript

"So you want to keep your master cylinder, or brake level, horizontal so that you can get all the fluid out. You basically push up, sort of against gravity to get all of the bubbles out. The other brake system that I'm most familiar with, the Hayes brakes, have a fairly similar bleed process. They don't come with quite as sophisticated of a bleed kit, and what you want to do with the Hayes brake is you want to make sure that the bleed screw, which is what this is, on your caliper, is horizontal with the ground - or excuse me - parallel with the ground so if I had this mounted here like this, this is a pretty good angle for that. See how it matches up with that when it's parallel with the ground. And then our master cylinder would be straight up because you can see this is the bleed port on the Hayes brake. So what we would do - you can also do a bench bleed, where if you have a shorter hose - this is for a rear brake, so the hose is wider than my arms. A bench bleed where you have your caliper up here on the ground and your piston on the floor. And the Hayes bleed kit is a bottle like this in which you put fluid, which mounts here on your bleed screw so I have a really stiff hose on here because I don't like it when my hose pops off because then I get that nice, caustic DOT fluid everywhere. We just stick it on. There we go. Now, I want to fill this with fluid before I put it on. And then on the master cylinder, take a small screwdriver and remove that. I'm not going to remove it now because then I'll get brake fluid everywhere and that's not my favorite thing to do. And then you can put another bottle, or you can use a syringe, just like you can use a syringe on the caliper end of things to bleed one of these systems. And that one you just set up empty, so I just have the syringe open like this, there's a little fitting that goes in there, another piece of hydraulic tubing, and you squeeze all of the air out of the system, sort of in a process like this. So you have your caliper horizontal, you've got your disc level pointing straight up in the air so you get all the bad stuff out of your system. And even if your brakes feel like they're working well, it's always a good idea to bleed your brakes once every six months or so because contaminants seep in through the lines."