Western Mass. Riding: Braking News

I finished the last of the bike upgrades today. I replaced the stock front brake line with a stainless steel unit. I also replaced the pads (front and rear) with EBC HH pads.

I debated on replacing the pads. Here are the old and new, side by side:

There really was still a lot of life left in the old pads. The wear limit is 1mm, extremely small. One time I ran a pad on my VFR down to the backing plate and another time a riding buddy let his go so far that the pads actually fell out of the caliper while parked. With a trip of this length I didn't want to have to even wonder how the brakes were.

The new line and pads were very easy to install, but bleeding the system was a bear. I worked on it for an hour or so last night but could not get any fluid out of the master cylinder. The fixes I read online were not consistent except to recommend a product called Mityvac. It's a vacuum pump, which literally sucks the fluid into the caliper.

Today I picked up a Mityvac system and my friend Erik from Ashfield came by to lend me a hand. With the Mityvac it literally took us two minutes to get the air out of the system. We flushed the entire system and put all new brake fluid in.


Nice sight!

We then moved on to replacing the rear pads and flushing the 4 year old fluid out of the master cylinder. We did this the traditional way and had no issues with air.

Erik gave me some tips on how to seat the new pads to the rotors. He suggested getting the KLR up to about 80 and slamming the brakes, slowing down to 30. So, we took it to the local interstate highway and did just that. Erik ran blocker for me from behind. I know it looked strange and suspicious and a number of car drivers stared at me when they passed. But I did it.

Wow, the braking performance now is amazing. The old brakes felt wooden; I never wanted to try to stop fast on a yellow light, I always ran them. I noticed two things about the KLR brakes now. When I was jamming them on I noticed the GPS could not accurately keep track of the speed. It would say "60mph" when I knew I wasn't going that fast. A second later it said "43." The KLR was decelerating much quicker than the GPS could pick it up. The other thing I noticed was the G-forces I was getting from the rapid deceleration. I got a headache, the KLR was stopping that fast. Never thought I'd say that about a KLR. Erik told me the EBC HH pads are actually for racing applications!