Replaced front and rear pads. Front no problems. But the rear, oh man. The resivoir was dry, the caliper was hard to get off, used a C clamp to compress the piston during install, filled up the resivoir, and started the manual bleed process. A few spits of fluid and that was it at the caliper bleed screw. Like the master cylinder is dry, tried to bleed from there, tried several things to clean out the caliper to cylinder line and the caliper itself with fresh dot 5. Will a Actron or Mityvac type bleed system help? I think my rear caliper may need to be re built, seems tight to the rotor. Any ideas? Thanks

 

Not sure about the bleeder systems, but with the age of your bike. I don't think it would be out of line to think about pulling the caliper apart for a complete overhaul. As old as your bike isits likely that the sides of the pistons hadsome rust orcrap on them andpushing them back in with a c-clamp has caused them to jam in their respective bores..My rule of thumb is that ifyou can't push them back in fairly easilyits time to pull them apart to find out why, cause something ain't right..
I'm not going to say you screwed up using a c-clamp. I do it all the time on cars. But cars have a lot more pressure to play with. So on bikes its better and easier to take them apart and carefully clean up the sides of the pistons and their bores if they give you ANY trouble pushing them back in.

 

uh oh.... yeah I do it on cars, the visible part of the piston sides was clean other than brake dust.

 

I am rebuilding the rear caliper, it had some slime. The rear master cylinder was the real problem. It was full of gorilla snot. So a new cartridge at the dealer today, I should be back on the road in no time.