A friend who is a professional mechanic recommended this item to me. My respect for his reputation diminishes by half as a result: First thing out of the box I thought I should assemble the pieces and do a dry-run test: I could not get a vacuum to form. The lip around the waste brake fluid continer would not seal. I thought there was an o-ring missing from the kit. I checked the instructions carefully and concluded a seal was not included. Eventually I tried all 6 orientations that the 4-ounce receiving vessel would snap into the lid containing Vacuum IN and Vacuum OUT plumbing, found 2 positions that kind of sealed, and marked the best orientation with a permanent marker so I could find it the next day for the wet-run. The manual vacuum pump develops a good vacuum. But the devil is in the details. Ancillary problems prevent the apparently excellent engineering of the vacuum piston, plunger, and valve from being useful. All told, I cycled a number of gallons of high-end (expensive) brake fluid through this device. My cost in wasted brake fluid is greater than the new price of this device. First, the worst design problem with this device is that it has only a 4-oz "collection vessel." When you have to quickly pump gallons through the bike to encourage air bubbles to travel down the brake lines, that's a hell of a lot of stopping just when the stream has almost emptied the air from the system to let the bubbles rise back up the vertical brake lines to the handlebars! The biggest problem is that that the small collection vessel requires that you constantly interrupt your progress every minute or 2 to re-empty the reservoir. There are so may problems with this unit, I include a bullet list, below. The vacuum release has a hair-trigger. And I MEAN hair-trigger. If you bump it, touch it against something on the side while trying to rest the unit on something while you refill the fast-emptying brake fluid reservoir on the handlbar (which needs attention every 15 seconds or so), the vacuum is released. At first I thought, "no problem," but it turns out when the vacuum is released by the device, air rushes back into the caliper's slave cylinder. You have to grip the vacuum pump in the same location where the vacuum release hair-trigger is, so... My advice is to use some snap-ring pliers to remove the vacuum release trigger. You can easily depress the end of the valve actuator without the giant hair-trigger lever-arm someone (probably a marketing committee) opted to include. There is the list of problems I encountered with this product. There may be a better product made by the same company, or maybe I just got a lemon. I can usually trust my mechanic friend's advice, but not WRT this item. It's problems include: Poor vacuum seal at lip of collection reservoir; Difficult to avoid vacuum-release hair-trigger; Rear handle of vacuum pump falls off while in use. (See photo); The sealed "clock-face window" for the vacuum gauge fell off. (Perhaps a worker forgot to glue it on?); The white splotch on the side of the vacuum meter bezel (in photo) is due to its coming in contact with DOT5.1 brake fluid -- the most harmless kind. One would think a tool made for use with brake fluid would not be immediately destroyed by brake fluid the first time it touches a tiny amount. The other side of the initially black bezel is mostly white; Neither of the two "6mm" soft rubber fittings provided seal reliably on my 6mm "grease nub" bleeder valves; The vinyl tubing they include was wadded up in a tiny compartment in the corner of the box. Even though I left it stretched straight overnight the night before trying to use it, it curls up when you try to use it, and knocks the miniature collection vessel over, and pulls the fitting off the bleeder valve at the least opportune times. Every time this happens, it introduces air back into the system that was there when I decided to use a "professional tool" to remove the sponginess remaining after I bled the brakes with my homebrew Gatorade bottle. When that infernal trigger kicks air back into the system, you have to start over again from the beginning; The rectangular black plastic piece straight off the face of the vacuum gauge fell off of the vacuum pump. I thought it was a decorative ending for the trigger, because its hollow cross-section is shaped like a cross-section of the giant lever-arm for the hair-trigger. But I see there is no such decorative end piece on the trigger in the product photos, so I am at a complete loss as to where it came from. When I say it "fell out," I mean it fell out. I didn't bump it, drop the pump, nothing. I was taking it into the other room to dry after cleaning it, and it fell out on the floor. After 6 hours of trying to get this unit to work (and I'm no neophyte -- I have bled brakes before) the sun went down, and I gave up. Total FAIL. The brakes were much worse than when I started. They weren't even spongy. No engagement at all. There may be more issues that I forgot to mention about this wonderful tool, but that's as much of my time as I can afford to contribute toward making Jeff rich(er) at the moment. Thank God I still have a little time left to return this POS!
