Brake caliper hard line broke

Hey guys, I’ve been looking high and low and cannot find an answer for this. Long story short my passenger side caliper dropped while replacing lower ball joints and sheered off my hard line. I replaced it and bled the brake line with a mighty vac gun. Is it necessary to bleed all the other brake lines? Thanks in advance.

 

Go for a drive. Brakes squishy? Bleed them all. Nice and firm? You’re good to go. And welcome to tw!

 

Also, kick ass first name. I’m totally biased.

 

why not?

 

Bleed them all, start at the furthest point and make your way to the closest to the master cylinder.

 

It may not be necessary, but it'd be good to "double check" for your personal safety.
It probably would've taken less time to bleed the other three corners than it did to post this question.

 

Don't for get the load proportioning valve in the back as well.

 

We don’t have one in a 2nd gen.

 

Oops. I forgot what Gen I was in. My opologies.

I'm glad you don't. That piece of equipment has caused more grief than most realize.

 

Thanks guys, everything I had seen was for complete flushes. Even the product videos for mityvac. This happened spur of the moment and I work in the oilfield and have to head out next day for two weeks. I test drove it, got it up to speed. Eased into the brakes, and then tried stepping on them heavy to test them. Everything seems to be working order. Just curious how much was needed after losing a small amount of fluid. I will take my bleeder and dot 3 with me.

 

If the master didn’t go dry, your fine bleeding the one.


But it’s in your head now, best time to do a brake fluid service and get fresh fluid in there if it’s nasty looking

 

I will most likely do a flush when I get back home. Thanks for the advice. It had barely dropped below the max fill line during all of this.

 

If you have the time to do it, pushing clean fresh brake fluid through the lines wouldn’t hurt any.

You’re probably ok as is as long as nothing funny happened like the master cylinder completely drained out.

One way to find out if you need to go further is, find a place where you have room to get up to enough speed to slam and lock up the brakes. Then get out to look at the marks your tires made. I like to do a progressive lock up, press the brake pedal, then progressively harder until they lock up leaving at least a few feet of rubber or dug up dirt, which means I need to be going maybe 30-50 mph depending on the vehicle. It should be very close to even. If not then you have issues. An ideal test spot would be a big empty parking lot with nothing to run into. Not too close to a police station like my dumb ass has done. I’d guess, since you already bled the passenger side, if the driver side somehow drained, when you test, the driver side would lock up late, or not at all causing it to try to turn right, or towards the passenger side. So first, you should probably do a semi hard stop, you’ll feel it pulling to the side. Then you already know you need to bleed both sides, or better all 4 corners. I’m pretty sure the correct way is closest to the master cylinder first, to furthest away, front drivers side, front passenger side, rear drivers side, rear passenger side constantly checking & adding fluid to the master cylinder. The 2 person pump and hold method works much better than a vacuum pump.

Brake fluid absorbs moisture from the air (a name for it, hydroscopic?). I used to be pretty anal and do a full flush every 3-4th oil change so I’d have clean fluid in it. Now I only do it if it stinks or looks really dirty.

You should also go back to double check your new line isn’t leaking but shouldn’t be since you used flare nut wrenches.