A rider brought in his fat bike because he had accidentally burped out one of the caliper pistons in the SRAM G2 Ultimate front brake. So it's a four-piston caliper with three stuck, one on the floor, and no juice left in it.
I figured I had one shot to do it economically with what he had: reinsert the rogue piston, juice the system with fluid I didn't mind losing, and use the usual pressure tactics to dislodge the other pistons. This meant trying to do at least a semi-effective fill and bleed to get any kind of pressure from the lever.
The procedure failed because the piston seals for the runaway were too damaged to hold the fluid. It gooshed out around the piston too quickly to impart any force on the remaining pistons. There is no back door way to get those bastards out of there. I can reassemble and keep trying, or troll through YouTube videos, but the shop's hour costs about $80.
This is yet another example of how the industry and its technolemming devotees have set themselves up for ever more expensive repairs for the sake of taking a bike ride.
One more time with the old chorus: Mountain biking started out as relatively cheap fun on beater bikes. Certain visionary riders saw that it could be so much more as long as money was no object. Money, and the precious life hours of mechanics who know better, but are stuck in this futuristic nightmare.
It fits right in with every other dystopian horror we're living through.
I've got one more thing I can try that might save this particular bacon before I report to him that he can tinker with it at his leisure or get a new caliper and start fresh. We'll see how it goes.
EDIT TWO HOURS LATER: The one more thing worked. It worked smoothly enough that it wasn't even too pricey, relatively speaking.
2 comments:
They want to get every bit of insanity out of everything
SR Sopchop
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