Robert Jones and Lydia Gregoret write about difficulty bleeding brakes.
I had quite a few problems bleeding the brakes on my Valiant (Chrysler)
station wagon. Pressure bleeding is an answer you should look at.
(of course, putting the bleed screw at the top helps - the clutch
slave cylinder on a friends MG midget has a similar problem with bleed
screw in the wrong place :-( ).
I got a spare lid for the fluid reservoir on the master cylinder,
drilled a hole in it, brazed a pipe into the hole (it was a metal lid,
if it was plastic I would have glued it on), and pressurized the fluid
reservoir. You then release the bleed screw and fluid flows out (very
quickly) until the resevoir is empty. Try not to go that far :-)
Pressure bleeding has an advantage that the air-bubbles keep moving,
they never get the chance to float back up any pipes. You could achieve
similar results with a volume of compressed air (an old bicycle tube)
and some sort of rubber-sealing-washer feeding the little hole in the
existing fluid reservoir cap (so long as you exercised patience and
were willing to experiment).
I have the advantage of having a compressor at home, so I put a click-on
fitting onto the pipe added to the pressure plate, bolted it up nice
and tight, set the pressure to 15 PSI (surrounded the master cylinder
with rags - it leaked a bit), and then bleed each brake. I had to add
fluid after each release of the bleed screw (it pushes quite a lot of
fluid out).
John Barlow (restoring Jaguar E-type 1968 2+2 manual)
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