Them's The Brakes

As I alluded to in an earlier post, Orthrus, my R65, needed a little work. I hadn't ridden it in a little while, but after changing the oil in all my bikes earlier this year I decided it was time to take it for a spin, so on a day where I was needed in the office I saddled up and started riding.

... only to realize that one of the brake calipers was frozen, and was in the process of locking up. Not good.

I managed to get it home and park it safely and then ride in to work on another motorcycle, but it was clear that there was some work to do.

Work which I documented in video form.

I was quite happy with the completed job, but there was one final task that I needed to clean up afterwards, which was fixing how the new, thinner brake lines fit through the grommets on either side of the lower triple clamp.

Without the brake hose solidly filling the grommet, the grommet itself wasn't really securely held in the clip, and so it could fairly easily fall out when the brake line moved due to the suspension compressing and extending.

The new brake line was approximately 1/4 OD, and the grommet (and old brake lines) were 3/8 ID. Luckily you can buy silicone tubing (which is UV stable) for really cheap, and 1/4 ID 3/8 OD is a common size.

I can't just slip it over the fittings and onto the brake lines, though. It's not nearly stretchy enough to do that, so I cut off a length and split it open so I could feed it on.

And now the grommet holds the brake line much more securely and, as a bonus, the brake line is protected from chafing against the lower triple clamp.

And it's a simple matter to repeat the process on the other side.

While I was working on the bike, I also wanted to see about fixing the turn signal indicators. The left indicator was working fine, but the right indicator had been giving me some trouble.

Unfortunately, I managed to order the wrong replacement bulbs.

It's not a big deal, though, as the replacement bulbs were cheap enough that I could just ignore the cost. It was also not a big deal because it turned out that the bulb wasn't burned out at all, it just had a little corrosion on the contacts and worked fine after cleaning it up a little.

So all's well that ends well.