This forum provides some great information on brake repair/bleeding, etc.

I thought I'd share my experiences. I recently bought a TRX 200SX that had been treated pretty rough. I'll still be posting questions here about it as I move on to other parts in need of repair. At this point though I think I have the brakes down pretty solid.

Lets start with the rear brakes as they are the less complicated. When I took the drum off the rear brakes I saw that I had shoes with no lining left. I ended up ebay'ing some new brake shoes for $14. While I was at it, I replaced the rear brake cable as the old one was rusted stuck.

As far as I can tell, without getting into the obvious cable adjustments, aligning the brake lever and cam along with having a strong spring is the key to "rebuilding" the rear brake. Unless the drum and interior are completely trashed its not difficult to get them up and going. I bought a new spring to push the rear brake arm back for $7 and I was on my way. One thing I did that leads be to believe that I did something wrong is I had to grind down part of the lip on the brake shoe that sits on the cam because I have the spring clip there and I couldn't get it flush on the cam without doing so. At any rate , it appears to work this way.

rear brake shoes - $14
new cable -$22
new spring $7

now on to the front - the fronts are a pain because I had no response from the handle at all. After much reading here my first purchase was a $29 vacuum pump with a host of attachments to help me in bleeding the brakes.

unfortunately for me that wasn't enough. I'd read alot about using the vacuum but nothing I did seemed to work. In a nutshell , if your brake system is clean and working that vacuum should be able to suck the brake fluid from the master cylinder , thru the splitter and out of the bleeder with very little effort.

After much hand wringing I determined that my front right brake hose/line was clogged and it was keeping air in the line and fluid from passing thru - at least at at adequate rate. Once again, I went to ebay, bought a used set (who can afford steel brake lines on a $500 toy?) for $20.

It was probably overkill but I didn't like the response I got from the master cylinder so I also bought a rebuild kit for the master cylinder for $22

The trick to rebuilding the master cylinder is to have a good set of long needlenose pliers to get the circlip out. For me, I went to Lowes and got a Kobalt set of pliers - various types 6 for $19 - one of which was a very small nimble pair of needle nose. After that, it was just a matter of bending the circlip tab to the point I could get a grip on it and rip it out. It took about 30 minutes without me knowing exactly what needed to be done.

After the simple process of rebuilding the master cylinder - two rubber grommets, a spring, a cam and a new circlip, I felt the response I got was just like brand new and I was much more motivated to get things going. At this point it was fairly obvious when I was building up brake pressure as opposed to before.

I read here that someone ultimately didn't have the brake response they wanted after alot of effort regarding bleeding. I was in the same boat. With the vacuum, I knew I had pulled fluid thru on both lines and I was at the point where the calipers were pushing out on one shoe. The person on here mentioned that the spring was too strong for the calipers and he took his off. On the TRX 200 shoes you have two springs, along with a clip on each side to hold the shoes in place. I took the top spring off, bent it straight to provide a bit more give and stretched the springs out a bit with some vice grips. Put it back and presto- both brake shoes now push out and I have rock solid pressure in my brake line.

the TRX using the front brakes stops on a dime. I'm still not happy with the rear brakes as it seems the weight of the rider over the wheels makes them give however it does slow me down. I may invest some time in fine tuning the rear brake cable to see if I can get better response.

After doing this, I'm not certain the vacuum is necessary to quickly get brake response but I'm not certain I would have ever come to the conclusion I had a clogged brake hose/line without it.

so - total investment in front brakes

vacuum - $29
used brake hose/line $20
master cylinder rebuild $22
front brake shoes - $18

as a side note, I've never had to use any teflon tape on the brake bolts and I've had the best luck bleeding my brakes by cracking the bleeder two full revolutions, not a quarter turn as I've read in a repair manual.

now on to the electrical.

 

I was also looking ta re building my rear brakes but i am un able to figure out how to remove the cover... sounds dumb but whatever lol