jonathan909

None of the above. Nothing so complicated, simply air getting past the bleeder screw threads. We got our Speedi Bleed yesterday and bled the system today. Quick. Silent. No pumping. Painless. No bubbles. Just Works. This is a great tool. I don't think I've ever specifically endorsed any such here, but it gets a hearty two thumbs-up from me.

True, but I'm getting more than "molecular volumes" here - this isn't exactly a micron filtration situation...

Hmmm. Good point. I may not have looked closely enough and it might be worth pulling it apart to confirm. Though if it's sucking air, it stands to reason that it'd bleed fluid when we step on the brakes.

That's what makes this so maddening - I do not suspect leaks elsewhere. This all kicked off when the hill holder (apparently) malfunctioned and locked the brakes while on level ground, causing the car to be towed home - twice. The hill holder is no longer in the car - I didn't just disconnect the clutch cable as suggested here, but yanked it altogether and joined the in/out brake lines together. I have no reason to believe there are any leaks, and, as an aside, point out that I've only suffered one brake line failure (corrosion) in the decade+ that I've been driving and maintaining these things, and that was in the 1995 Legacy Wagon - almost ten years older than this car. So my present sanity check is to push fluid until the bubbles go away. If they fail to do so, I will declare myself insane.

I've had a mityvac forever too, and I've got a vacuum pump (use it for AC evacuation and oiling), so there's no shortage here of potentially-useful kit. Before returning the PT kit I tried putting some Dow Corning High Vacuum Grease on the bleeder threads, but even that didn't stop the bubbles - whether they're actually in the lines or occurring locally is a mystery only solved by abandoning the vacuum approach, so that's what I'm doing. I'll have the Speedibleed kit on Monday and see how that goes.

Yes, it has ABS. Haynes said something about using a scan tool to cycle the ABS, but mine doesn't appear to support that function. If it's a simple matter of manually activating the ABS via a diag connector pin, that doesn't sound like a big deal - should be easy enough to track that down.

I've decided that the Performance Tool bleeder I linked to at the outset is junk because sucking rather than blowing is inherently flawed. In fact, here's what their product support person (who claimed that there are teflon tapes that resist brake fluid, but did not specify) said when I described the problem: "These bleeders... suck at bleeding the system" So I'll be returning it to Princess Auto today. I'd try the Motive bleeder next (a jug with a hand pump that attaches to the master cylinder), but ran across this one: https://speedibleed.com/ I like the idea of using shop air (or tire pressure - a cute hack) instead of a hand pump, it's cheaper than the Motive (which has no Canadian distributors - I'd have to buy it from Amazon), and comes from just over the border in BC. Should be here in a day or two, will advise.

They look like a Good Thing. My only question is: If you're stomping in the driver's seat, how are you to know when you've "stomp[ed] as many times as necessary"?

Back to my daughter's '03 Forester. I won't get into all the painful details of what a horrorshow this has been to date. Just trying to solve present problem: Bleeding. Since we weren't having any luck doing it Old School (stomp, twist, stomp, twist), I figured I'd give a power bleeder a shot. Someone mentioned the Motive pressure bleeder here in an old thread, but looking around yielded mixed reviews that suggested they used to be great but in more recent years the quality fell off and everything leaked. My local preferred source had the Performance Tool version: https://wilmarllc.com/w89204/w89204-pneumatic-brake-bleed-kit on the shelf and they have a painless refund policy, so it seemed worth a try. The difference is rather than pushing fluid under pressure into the master cylinder, this one generates a vacuum from shop air and sucks at the wheel cylinder. But on the first wheel (RR), we've already put 500ml of fluid through and the bubbles aren't letting up, leading me to believe that air is getting sucked through the threads of the bleed screw, as we have no reason to believe there are leaks anywhere else in the system. I just learned that teflon tape is NFG for sealing in this application, as the brake fluid eats it. Is there anything I can use to seal the threads and eliminate this (potential) leak during bleeding? I realize, of course, that this is an intrinsic problem with a vacuum vs. pressure bleeder. Helpful suggestions are, of course, welcome in addition to the actual answer.

"Open" being where it is when the clutch is not depressed?

Turns out the sonofabitch does have a hill holder. They thought not because it's never shown itself to be functional. But that doesn't mean it can't malfunction. So what's the shortest route to getting it out of the circuit? It looks like there's just one line that goes in and out of it from the master cylinder. So do we just get a F/F adapter for the flare nuts and mangle those two lines together?

As long as you can believe that it can also un-seize. That'll probably be the next thing we open up, just because it's easiest.

Yeah, and they don't "get better" after a ride on a flatbed. My information is that she had no trouble moving the shifter from gear to gear, and when she tried to go got a hot+stinky clutch for her efforts.

2003, and no hill holder in evidence, afaIk.

This is a weird one - a problem my daughter's having. The car is relatively new to her and in pretty good shape. Despite this, it's put her in a jam a couple of times, both after the hour's drive into the city center, downtown during rush hour - about the least desirable time/place for such a failure. The symptom is that she'll stop at a light, and when it turns green attempt to move, but letting out the clutch simply stalls the engine. Repeated attempts yield the same result. She then calls for a tow and the driver has to brute-force the car onto the flatbed because the wheels won't turn. By the time it arrives home via the truck, whatever jammed has let go and it's returned to normal. Frustrating, to say the least. I was hoping (as well all do) for the simplest and least invasive discovery, e.g. something loose in the rear brakes, but pulling those drums is itself a PITFA and all we managed to do is create more problems without finding anything. So before we go any further, can anyone suggest anything?