Finally figured out why my shop's brake bleeds kept failing

Three years ago at my shop in Kansas City, I was bleeding Shimano brakes on a customer's mountain bike and kept getting spongy lever feel no matter how many times I cycled the system. I swapped out the bleed kit, tried different mineral oil, even rebuilt the caliper. Last week I watched a YouTube video where a guy mentioned that some aftermarket barb fittings have a slightly different thread pitch, and I realized I'd been using a random barb from an old kit. Swapped it for the OEM one and the bleed worked perfect on the first try. Has anyone else run into issues with mismatched bleed parts that look identical?

2 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

2 Comments

thomas8623mo ago

Man, I ALWAYS thought parts were parts. This totally changed my mind.

4

gracecarr3mo ago

Did you hear that podcast episode about this? So eye-opening!

5