I love coming home to presents! Looks like the postman had his work cut out for him today!(Well, yesterday) My jackshaft came, chain adjusters, brake bleed kit and some bits for what I'll be covering in this post: adapters to use a hydraulic bicycle brake with a motorbike lever.
I'll be using the bicycle brake line since trying to adapt a motorbike line to the very small banjo fitting on the caliper would be extremely difficult. To start, I needed something that would adapt the M10(10mm) port on the motorbike lever to something a bit more standard and something the size I needed. Fortunately there's a guy on eBay who makes custom adapters for Fox Mustangs that go from M10 to 3/8". SWEET!
But it wasn't as simple as that. I still needed to modify the 3/8 female double-flare end to accommodate the soft bicycle line and compression-type fitting. The end looks pretty much exactly the opposite of what I needed it to look like.
I ordered some of the corresponding flare nuts and some 3/16" 'olives' (which I just found out is the proper term for the compression sleeves).
Then to work on the custom adapter. I just started rummaging through tools and I found that a #1 center drill, when used like an endmill, would give me a nice taper and a slight counterbore for the hose barb to fit in. This counterbore is of utmost importance because the olive needs to grip firmly onto the hose and the barb simultaneously to seal them and prevent them from coming apart.
The 3/16 olive didn't quite fit over the 5mm line so I had to ream it out but this is the two pieces on the line. I already assembled this before I realized I forgot to take a picture. Notice the barb sticking out of the olive slightly.
And together.
I knew I wanted to route the line through the fork tube to keep the install clean so I had already drilled a hole in the bottom of the one tube but wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do up top. For fear of ruining a perfectly nice fork tube, I just drilled the plastic cap and ran the line out of that. Turns out I like this idea better than anything else I was thinking of doing.
A nice little grommet in the bottom protects the line.
I haven't bled it yet, I'm going to wait til it's warm enough to do it outside, but for bleeding I'm just going to follow the instructions here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZkEIrCBJ0
I still want to get rid of the large reservoir first anyways. It's the wrong color, it's large, the bracket is flimsy, it just generally sucks. I'm prolly gonna need to disassemble all of this anyways to weld the frame back together. No sense in bleeding twice.
