THE MTB MINUTE

LEARN HOW TO BLEED SHIMANO BRAKES

There’s no surer way to knock your confidence than dropping in to some flowy goodness and finding you’ve got spongy levers and your brakes aren’t doing their job.

Having the ability to keep your brakes at their punchy best is essential for happy riding, and in this edition of #MTBminute, our lead Scottish guide Chris Gibbs shows you they key stages of bleeding your Shimano brakes – without getting into a mess!

10 Easy steps to bleeding a Shimano brake

1. Remove wheel from the calliper you plan to work on
2. Leave the brake pads in when pushing pistons back
3. Remove pad retaining pin
4. Insert pad spacer and secure with the pin
5. Level the brake lever to avoid unwanted air bubbles entering the system
6. Carefully insert the bleed bucket ensuring not to over tighten the bucket
7. Remove any air bubbles from the syringe
8. Depress syringe whilst watching the bucket until the mineral oil runs clean and bubble free
9. Flick the brake lever a few times with bucket still attached to force any remaining unwanted bubbles out of the system
10. Clean and insert new brake pads

Tick, tick, tick, tick…

What can you learn in a minute? Well, quite a lot as it turns out…

From changing a gear cable to mastering the attack position, in the #MTBminute we take on some of the most pressing questions around your mountain bike life and attempt to show you the key stages in just 60 seconds!

Using decades of collective guiding, riding and mechanical experience we’ve carefully created each minute-long video to give easy-to-follow, practical tips that will demystify skills and techniques. They might still take years to master but with the #MTBminute at least you’ll be off to a solid start.