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A collection of helpful maintenance tips Just a little tip for those who care. I noticed that the rubber grommets on my Magnas where the side covers snap on were getting old and dry. I had a auto parts salesman tell me about a liquid rubber rejuvenator. It is a product from atp professional auto parts that is called AT-205 Re-Seal. It is made to stop leaks in seals in Power Steering units, rack and pinion and transmission seals. If you are interested or think you need it, give it a try. I used it and it seemed to help them. Brad Phillips 1986 V65 Magna "Taz" 1983 V45 Magna "Priss" Get On, Shut Up and Hold Tight Brake rebuild Photogallery From Katherine Becker (Sabmag) I've worked on the brakes on a lot of Sabres, at this point. I have found there is more braking improvement to be had by fixing stuck sliders and by removing, cleaning, and replacing the caliper pistons, than there is in replacing the brake lines. Though all these things help. Sliders: Depending on whether the previous owner preferred the rear bake or the front, one end of every bike always seems to have a stuck slider. Even if they aren't completely stuck, one crunchy slider can screw up brake feel for that caliper/disc, wear the brake pads unevenly, and transfer braking load to the other calipers, wearing them unevenly. Sliders can be fixed without opening the hydraulics, though hammering a badly corroded slider out can be a real hassle. You can leave the caliper on the line, and set it on a big block wood, next to the bike. (Of course, if you're really going to do this right, you'll be opening the hydraulics anyway. So you might as well bring the caliper over to the bench to beat the sliders out of it, after you push the pistons out and detach the calipers from the brake lines.) Wail on the slider with a big fookin hammer. You may have to put a big punch in the center hole of the slider to get a clean hit without damaging other stuff. The sliders can come out looking like they're made of limestone instead of metal. Throw them away if you can't make them smooth. Clean the hole they go in and make it as smooth as you can without enlarging it. Reassemble with new sliders and dust covers and with a lot of waterproof grease. Caliper pistons: Use the hydraulic pressure to pump them both almost all the way out. Usually only one of them will move, but you can use a big C clamp to hold the moving one in enough to keep the system closed and get pressure on the other one. Clean out the wells they go in, and make them as smooth as possible. Clean the pistons off and make them as smooth as possible. Reassemble with new seals. Freeing the sliders made a huge improvement in the braking ability, and cleaning out the caliper pistons made another huge improvement. The braided lines gave an improvement, but it was nothing in comparison. It also improves the feel when you clean and grease the pivot points on the brake and clutch lever, and replace those little brass barrel pivot thingies if they are out of round. and My front brakes developed a shuddering that seemed exactly like uneven brake rotors. The rotors showed a strange wear pattern going on, in a visual inspection. I didn't have any handy way to measure how far off they were, but they looked obviously bad. I pushed the brake pistons all the way out, like I described in a post earlier this week. Cleaned everything carefully, and used some fine sandpaper to smooth out the rough spots. Replaced the seals. Got all the moving parts working smoothly. Put it all back together, thinking I'd pull some rotors from a parts bike later. But it turned out I didn't need to. The pulsing went away, and after riding and using the brakes a bit, the strange wear patterns I had seen on the rotors disappeared. The reason rotors wear unevenly and the brakes start pulsing, is because there's something else wrong in the system. If you can find that problem and fix it before the rotors get too bad, the pulsing may go away. If you don't fix the underlying problem, even new brakes rotors won't stay smooth for long. When you pull the brake lever, the pistons push out. There are pistons on just one side. The force of the pads on the piston side, pressing on the rotor, causes the whole caliper to move sideways on the sliders, and this brings the other brake pad into play. If everything is working smoothly, the pads will both contact the rotor with equal force, and how can the rotor help but wear evenly? But if a slider is stuck, then the second pad will not be brought into contact, or else it won't be released when you release the lever. One stuck slider or piston will create twisting forces. The twisting forces cause squealing or shuddering behavior and eventually wear the pads and rotors unevenly. If one slider or piston is not 100 percent stuck, but is just hard to move, the hydraulic forces push it into the "ON" position, but there's not enough force to push it back and make the brakes release. You pull the lever to squeeze the brake pads together, and when you release the lever, only one of the pads backs away from the brake. The other one just drags until enough pad wears away to release it. This dragging not only wears the pads rapidly and unevenly, it overheats the rotor, and this could warp it. (Not to mention the horsepower drain of riding with the brakes on.) If the rotors are warped from overheating, they won't recover, and even turning them is not going to work. But if the rotors still spin true, they just have high spots due to bad wear, then fixing the underlying problem may smooth the rotors just as well as turning them might have. When you take the pads out, you should be able to push the pistons in with your bare hands. Push one piston in with your thumb, the other will come out by an equal amount. If you need a C-clamp to do it, this is a sign that things are not right in that caliper. Also, you should be able to slide the slider back and forth, and it should move smoothly, like a bearing, with no effort at all and no crunchiness. What I'm saying is that anyone in this group who hasn't done this recently oughtta go out to their garage and take a look at their brakes. If I went around to all the 80's Sabres and Magnas that show up at a SME, and checked out the brakes, I bet three out of four bikes would have at least one stuck slider. It might even be four out of four. The condition of our brakes is almost universally dismal. I have taken apart enough sabmag brakes to know. Brakes are really important. It's not hard to fix them. Why not get them working right? -- Katherine Becker kbecker@stilyagi.org http://www.stilyagi.org/~kbecker The contents of this site are copyright© 2003, Sabre & Magna Owners-Texas (SMOT) All Rights Reserved. Official Website of the Sabre & Magna Owners-Texas Motorcycle Riding Club. www.smot.net