FMH LIVE! Mike Roen Talks Tech

Hello, and welcome to "Fix My Hog." This is a live event. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Dennis Santopietro. Look at that on the screen, it says my name. And it's spelled correctly, look at that. That's pretty hard to do. Nice, that is pretty hard to do. I've been trying all my life. Well, I'm here with Mike Roen. Thanks for coming out today. Right. We're doing this live event. Mike's got his notes. He's got a bunch of brake parts here. We just wanna touch base a little bit on the history of brakes, the good and the bad of Harley's systems throughout the years. Pretty much the general overview. Yeah. And some other related components. Some failure points, some good, some bad. Some products when they switch from one fluid to the other. Just kind of through the years. Exactly. If you're on the fixmyhog.com website, in the chat box, the orange, it's orange, I believe, I'm color blind. You can put questions in there, and I'm gonna swing back over, and after Mike's done doing his demonstration, I'll read out some questions to Mike, and he'll get to them. What we wanna do is kinda keep these on brake-related questions today, not, "Hey, my bike won't start," something like that. We might be able to get to those, but we really wanna focus on brakes today. Also, under the chat box, there is a download troubleshooting with trouble codes. Oh, look at that. Did you do that? Look, it's like magic. So you can click on that. Thanks. You can download that; that's free. The other thing about "Fix My Hog," if you're not familiar with it, please check us out. There's tons of free videos. Join to be a member. We have, I don't know, 800 plus videos. We have topics from maintenance, performance upgrades, projects. We just finished the Knucklehead project. We have some Shovelhead videos coming up. We have Panhead series coming up. Mike is gonna do an Evolution series for us. We have all the twin-cam maintenance videos, performance, M8 maintenance and performance. So check out all the categories on the site. I'm blabbing, 'cause I don't know what to say. So I'll let you get at it right. Keep right on going, man. You got your notes. Yeah. And I'll go over there and when you're done, I'll shoot you some questions. Sure. All right man, sounds good. Sounds, buddy. Okay like Dennis was saying, we're just gonna be doing a general overview of all the Harley brake components and covering all the year groups, just looking at problems and suggestions and upgrades. But really what we can do is start at the beginning of the history. And he had mentioned earlier about Kevin Bass and doing the restoration on the knucklehead. And if you watch that video, you're gonna see Kevin get into drum brakes. And that's really what motorcycles all had back then. And he goes over the maintenance thing on drum brakes, pretty good. But if you buy an older motorcycle and you've got a newer motorcycle and you ride a motorcycle with drum brakes, you're gonna realize, wow you think about it. They put a man on the moon in 69, but they certainly couldn't stop a motorcycle. So it's gonna take a little bit to adapt to riding a motorcycle like that. So you buy an old vintage bike, it's got drum brakes, don't get out in rush hour traffic and start to run to go to the flow of traffic and think, oh, I got this situation covered 'cause the second you dynamite those brakes, it's not gonna be like your twin-cam. You're gonna need a lot more real estate to slow that thing down. And of course with a drum brake, they don't like heat. They fade, they go away. So time moves on, my little sister bought an old Mustang like five years ago and she said, "There there's something wrong with my brakes." And I drove the car and I said, "Nope, that's how they work." And they didn't have power brakes. So you just have to have that mindset when you ride old equipment, it's not like new equipment. So moving on you keep going through the years, basically Harley they had to step up the British, the Japanese, everybody was getting hydraulic brakes, with a caliper, and moving on drum brakes were gone. Everybody saw the writing on the wall. So what did Harley do? They came out with the man banana caliper on the shovel heads in the early seventies. And that was basically their platform. If you had an FX or if you had an FL, this was your baby, and it wasn't all that great, but it was a step in the right direction. It's the seventies, so they weren't like chasing weight and thinking performance, but this, they call it the banana caliper just 'cause the shape here. And this is a 77 FL, I bought it like 20 some years ago. And I did the restoration on the motorcycle, I started riding it quite a bit. And right away I realized these brakes gotta go because I was riding traffic, and I was used to riding so many different motorcycles that had good brakes that I knew, eventually I did upgrade the brakes to twin-cam 007 and the wheels too. And now I got good brakes on my shovel head. But for the most part, pretty archaic they're weird 'cause they had pretty good lever feel, but they just didn't work very well. So there again, if you got an old shovel and it's got the banana caliper on it, don't expect it to be like your twin-cam. So put that aside. So check my notes here. Then you got through the seventies, the Evo came along 84, the 99, they had a fairly decent braking system. It worked all right, it was adequate. I wouldn't say by the mid nineties they could have probably made it a lot better. If you look at all the metric bikes, the sport bikes, they really in terms of braking, they really went far with it and came along and Harley kinda drug their heels on it till about 2000. Then they came out this platform here and it was pretty good. That's what I got on my bike. And they ran that all the way to 07. 2008, Brembo, and that's basically what, we got Nate's bike here, I think it's a 2012, but anything 2008 and later for tourings it's gonna have the Brembo brake. Brembo it's got a pretty good name in the industry. Nothing really wrong with it, we did see some issues with them warping rotors, prematurely, but it depends on your riding style. So take peak here, see where I'm gonna go next. Really, I guess where I wanna start is with brake fluid. 'Cause it's, for a while there nobody ever talked about brake fluid. It was like just something you didn't think about. 2008 rolls along, these motorcycles get ABS and they're running DOT 4 brake fluid. Now all of a sudden brake, fluid's a big deal. So let me back up a little bit. All the earlier motorcycles basically on Harley's were DOT 5 silicone. So keep that in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is your factory manual. 'Cause you're always gonna wanna refer to what your motorcycle's running for brake fluid. You might have bought the motorcycle used and you think, well I know what brake fluid my motorcycle has 'cause it says it right here on the cap. Doesn't mean that's the right cap for your bike. Junior might have went out bought a Chrome Aftermarket one and he bought the wrong year group one, but it's still fit. And now it says DOT 5 on there and it's supposed to have DOT 4. Suddenly you're contaminating your brake fluids and that's a big deal. You don't want put DOT 4 in DOT 5, you don't wanna put DOT 5 in DOT 4. So look at your manual, find out what year your motorcycle is, put the right brake fluid in it. And obviously you're gonna want to flush that brake fluid, these motorcycles are getting old now. It's hard to believe, twin-cam came out in 1999, it doesn't seem that long ago, but that's some pretty old brake fluid in there. So let me get back to the year group where they stopped using DOT 5, 'cause for the most part DOT 5 silicone brake fluids, really good brake fluid. And I think what happened in 2005, all the FL touring models got DOT 4 brake fluid. Why? I'm not sure probably cost 'cause DOT 5 costs a lot more than DOT 4. You're making 300,000 motorcycles make sense. Also I think what they had on the horizon was they knew ABS was coming. So they're probably trying to groom people into thinking DOT 4, and with that 2008, we get ABS. Now suddenly we're having ABS failures. Why? Because people aren't changing their DOT 4 brake fluid enough. It's more susceptible they're braking down, absorbing moisture, whatever, deteriorating, people aren't purging their ABS unit enough and then it deteriorates, and now you got a bad ABS unit. Harley sends out a bolt in every two years now. And so that becomes a big issue, not to say on your old bike with DOT 5 silicone, you probably should be changing that too, because now you've got such an old motorcycle that you need to inspect the brake lines, the calipers, everything when you're talking this motorcycle's almost 50 years old. If I was still running the banana caliper, I'd be looking over everything, provided when I flush it. Here's a little example of some deterioration on brake fluid. You buy this motorcycle, maybe it's a basky case, maybe it's been sitting. And if it's been sitting for more than what? Four, five, six years, maybe it's been sitting there 10 years, you can bank on the fact that you're gonna have some serious maintenance ahead of you when it comes to the brake components. 'cause if it's been sitting, you can see all the deterioration it's going on here. Master cylinder, it's probably gonna have to be rebuilt or worse yet. All the aluminums deteriorated in there it's pitted. So you can rebuild it till the cows come home, and guess what? You still have a problem. So now you're into now I gotta replace the whole assembly. So brake fluid, it's really important. Another thing is you overheat your brakes and that's not brake fluid anymore. Like a chemical reaction takes place, it's just a liquid in there that's not doing anything. So if you really, I mean, not that you're gonna be road racing your bike, but if you overheat it or you think you have, and you're in the mountain, you're two up, you got a trailer, I don't know your scenario, but at any rate, change your brake fluid every two years. You'd feel good about yourself. Okay we covered that base. I think next up might as well talk about rotors 'cause we'll just jump into that. So, brake rotors. I don't know what year your motorcycle is. Like I said, 80, 40, 99, you're talking Evo, you're gonna have something similar to this big old heavy duty rotor. Harley's not worried about weight. they're just making motorcycles and they want 'em stop. So when you're putting brake pads in your bike, you're always gonna look at the rotor. It's gonna be under scrutiny 'cause what you're looking for is, I don't have a totally wasted rotor here, but what happens, you can probably get a shot of that. There's usually a lip develops here. That's an indicator that, okay, my rotor. this bike's got 60,000 miles on it and I got a nice lip on here. Guess what? Well, there is a lip right here, actually in the transition. So this thing's got some time on it. I'm doing brake pads. Guess what? I'm gonna splurge, I'm gonna buy me a brand new brake rotor, 'cause I love to do the maintenance on my bike and I want it right. So keep that in mind if you're going down that road, if you got an older motorcycle doing some restoration. Another thing is, I don't know if you can see this, if he can see that or not, I'll give it to you, but this thing is severely warped. And maybe you can tell, but at any rate, how does that have happen? A couple different ways. More than likely what might have happened is somebody put brand new brake pads in their motorcycle and all along someone had been topping off the brake fluid. So they put the brand new brake pads in, they retract them, they put it on, and what they don't realize is there's two more much brake fluid in the system now. They go out for a ride, they get a little heat in the bike. And I don't know if this, but you cannot compress a liquid. So it just forces those pistons back out, puts the brakes on the rotor. Incrementally, the heat starts increasing. It intensifies the brake fluids boiling. And now you're on the side of the road, and you got old rotter that looks like this and my motorcycle won't roll. You're right, it won't roll. So anytime you put brake pads in your bike, you gotta take your master cap off and you gotta set the brake fluid. You pump it up, check the level, which brings me to another really good topic is when you do put the brake pads in, I'll always pump up the brake because you're always checking that brake light. You need to know if the brake light's working, both front and rear. 'Cause I tell you what I've done it in the last 39 years, I've rolled a motorcycle off my lift that I've put brakes in and I go for that test ride, and that first stop sign I'm coming to, I put the rear brake on and I forgot to pump it up it gets your attention. And you might not have the luxury of having that extra 10th of a second when you put the brake on, you might need your brake in that 10th of a second. So pump up your brake, make sure the brake light's working, set the brake fluid level. If you and your buddies are going on a road trip that weekend and your buddy says, "Yeah I just put brakes on my bike." Do 'em a favor and say, let's check your brake fluid level, 'cause I don't want you wrecking my weekend with being on the side of the road a hundred miles down the road or whatever. So pretty important. Brake rotors of course, obviously over the years Harley's trying to make 'em better. And we can look just look at a couple of these. This is basically, this is an 07, 00 to 07 brake rotor right here. I'll give you a shot of that. Now compare that to the old Evo one. I'd say there's, I don't know, it feels like 10 pounds difference, it's probably not. But look at the thickness. They kinda built it back then, they might over-engineered it 'cause they want to it to last and now they're they're going, hey wow, we can make these thinner, we can make 'em lighter. They're drilled, and they're trying to, with this design they're trying to ABSorb that heat so this rotor can actually warp and then come back and hold its position. And sometimes they failed on that when they did that. Some year groups are more notorious for warping the rotor. I know a 08 CVO touring models had a terrible design where the perimeter bolted on to the mag and it seemed like they warped the rotors quickly. And how do I know if I have a warped rotor? Well, when you're putting that front brake on and you're at speed, you're always gonna get feedback. You gotta get in tune with your motorcycle and that front brake lever's gonna tell you when your rotors are warped, it's gonna start out with a real slight pulse. And the more you dynamite that brake the more it's gonna get worse. The more you ride it, the more the warping is gonna intensify, the more the feedback's gonna get. Same thing on the rear brake, you're gonna be feeling it. That's a sign, oh, something's going on. Why is my rotor warped? Is it just because I've been abusing it, brake fluid level, whatever, bad design so on and so forth. I tell you what, is 1990, a buddy of mine was road racing. And we were at road America, he's doing a three hour road race, and the factory, Yamaha jumped in just for testing. So they'd go out, they'd do a field ops, they'd come in, and they pitted like right next to us. And Jamie James got off his bike, they put it up on lifts and they took that front wheel and spun it. And I think it rotated for like five minutes. There was no resistance. This thing, it's a race bike. The wheel bearings are top notch, the brakes they retract. So that wheel can FreeWheel 'cause they want to go fast, but they want to stop. When you're working on your motorcycle, you're gonna put brake pads in it. You're gonna set the brake level and you're gonna have the wheel off the ground and you're gonna roll, and you need to determine, okay, is this thing freewheeling properly? Because if it isn't, you gotta go back in and see what did I screw up or what's going on with my motorcycle? Cause it's your brakes and it's not a car. And when you fall out an asphalt, it hurts. So you don't wanna do that. The other thing is I don't have a really good rotor here to show it, but they're called floating rotors and actually Harley sells 'em, Aftermarket Vendors sells 'em and what they have is they have a rivet like this, but they have multiple of rivets. And what that's allowing the rotor to do is find center way more accurately. So I if you're time to upgrade your rotors, I always wanna spend the money for the full floating rotor because that's the cool guy rotor. So while we're talking about rotors, believe it or not, some people are sensitive to brake noise on Harley's. I know it's hard to believe, but they are. And one thing you can do when you're doing your brake job, get yourself some brake contact cleaner and a rag and clean your rotor up nice and clean. Because over time, depending on the road you live on, debris is gonna get impregnated into do this rotor and it's gonna get impregnated into your brake pads and you might get a squeak and guess what? Then they think, oh, my brakes are shot, they're squeaking. Motorcycle comes in, I look at the brake pads and go, nope, you haven't used your front brake at all. It's squeaking because there's dust and debris on there, clean it up, go right at another couple thousand miles. And if it starts squeaking again, clean your brakes again, do an inspection on the brake pads. Make sure they really aren't shot. So something to think about when you're doing your front brakes. I'm sorry, Mike, since you're on rotors, can they be resurfaced? That was gonna bring that up. Guess what? You were, see? You cannot, I mean, I can't, no Harley, dealer's gonna, if you're some super duper machinist and you wanna attempt to do it, you can, but the problem with that is now you're your caliper pistons, they only come out so far. Now you're getting in an area where nope, lawsuits, lawyers, things problems. So nope, your money had anyway, I mean really for a standard brake rotor, I think they're 140 bucks each or something. Aftermarket rotors, you can buy 'em for $500 each. We're gonna get into the Aftermarket stuff here kind at end, I don't want to talk about that right now 'cause I'm trying to stay on track so. Yeah, sorry that one just popped up I figured since you're on the- No, I wanted to talk about that anyway. That was something on there, but my brain's pretty small. Okay, so we covered that. I did bring up the Brembo. 'Cause there was a question about that the guy said, "I used an American Allen on my Brembo" 'cause it's metric. It is a five millimeter thing. That Brembo really, for the most part, those brake pads on the 08 and later touring models, it's probably the simplest bike you'll ever change brake pads on. There's one Allen bolt, which is five millimeter. And you pop that out, same thing. Put the pads in, set your brake fluid level, torque, everything, spec, put it all together. That is a real easy motorcycle. I mean you're on this website because you're doing all your maintenance, you got your manual. That one, I think my mom could do. At any rate, okay, now, I think what we're gonna do is I'm gonna just show you the 00 to 07 caliper, because it's a very common brake, I mean it's from 00 to 07, every twin-cam, big twin basically had this style of brake. And it's an easy brake to almost screw up, putting brake pads in. For one, you can almost put these brake pads in backwards and I'll show you here. So there again, this is a socket you're gonna wanna have in your toolbox. If you own a Harley, it's a quarter inch, 12 point socket. See that, there you go. Probably says something about it in your manual too. Two bolts right here, we're gonna pop them out. And we'll probably talk about brake pads and the materials and all that good stuff 'cause there's a, I could probably lab on stuff for five minutes. There's a lot of different directions you can go when it comes to brake pads, but for me, I like the factory brake pad, not saying just the factory brake pad, but I like the material, it's centered. And they started coming out centered brakes, probably in the nineties I would imagine. And the nice thing about a center brake pad is they work really well. They got really good longevity, and they don't fade with abuse. So pop that out of there. Here's part of the procedure, when you're working on your motorcycle at home and it's the weekend and you wanna go riding, and you need brake pads here's what I want you to do, I didn't let the brake pads fall out for a reason, because this is the big deal with this caliper setup. I'm gonna pull, I'll just try and show this like this, I'm gonna pull the top one out and there it is. In fact I'm gonna get a magic marker right away and I'm gonna put an X on this thing. Because I'll show you why, there's the other brake pad. These two brake pads are different so you can't put 'em in backwards. See this little step here? This one doesn't have it, it's not clearance that same way. So now I now, okay, guess what? I got my new brake pads, I can put an X on my new brake pad that has this little, same contour. So I know when I'm looking at my caliper, I gotta be looking at that X, that's the side of that brake pad I gotta see. 'Cause if you flip like this and try and put 'em in, you almost can do it. And I've had to go to customer's house and trailer, their bike home, 'cause they're like, I just can't get my brake pads in, it's that close. And so you don't wanna be that guy. But here's the other problem with these, and I can probably screw this up real quick and show you how easy it is to screw up. You just plop 'em in there like that, and this is easy. It's got a little rattle clip that puts tension on the brake pad. And so you go, this is easy. Push it in, take the other one, push it in, tighten it down. Well actually it went in right, but I'll see if I can screw it up better just for display purposes. Okay. You get a shot of that. Now what what's happened here, if I had the brake pins in and tightened up and then I roll it over and I go, huh, great, my brake pad got an angle. Now what's happened is that brake pads gotten under that anti rattle clip and you go, well, that's no big deal. I'm just gonna take my flat blade screwdriver and I'm gonna force this thing back. It almost kinda works. What you're doing is you're destroying the anti-rattle clip right now. And if you wink on it hard enough, eventually you'll get the brake pad spread. You'll put it on your motorcycle and you'll roll the wheel and go, God, it just seems terrible. You're right, it is. 'Cause now the rattle clips, not in the right place, the brake pad's still trying to work in and so it's grabbing the rotors. what you probably wanna do when you're putting these brake pads in is you can take, you can probably take a flat bed and stick it in there. And all you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna want to keep those brake pads apart because, you can get a shot of that right in there, that's your rattle clip in there. And it's a bogus little spring loaded thing that you don't wanna damage. So okay, there it is, there's my X, marks the spot, put that one in That one in. Screw driver in makes feel good. You have to depress the brake pad in 'cause you're collapsing that anti rattle clip. You don't want to have brake pads rattling, 'cause that's annoying. Here's the deal, you're not on flat rate. If you don't take the time to pull them pins out and do it right, I mean I'm seeing kids at dealerships or shops that get impatient too, because it's a little mouse trap. Typically, I just put 'em in. Double check, make sure I'm not getting crazy. One in. Make sure it's still spread. Depress it. Put it in, looks good. Tighten her up, of course there's to be a torque spec there, but we're good. We're not going riding today. Here you go. Brake pads are in, so it's an important deal and you can see how fast you can get upside down on just a simple little brake pad change on your motorcycle. Okay, what else do we want to talk about? I suppose we could talk about bleeding the brakes, Ideally, a lot of people have like a medevac and they're sucking the brake fluid through. Doesn't always work that great on a Harley. A a lot of times what I end up doing is taking a syringe and I back bleed the system. There again, you gotta have the cap off 'cause you can't, you still can't compress a liquid. You can try, but you can't. So you pull your reservoir cap off, get the proper brake fluid, crack the bleeder and then you can actually force it back through that way. Same thing going the other way, once you get that bled that way, then I like to put a clear hose on here, get a receptacle and then you can pump up the brake and crack the bleeder and bleed it the other way. It's a little game where you get to chase it back and forth. So that's one way to do it. Brake lines, obviously, if you've got an older motorcycle and you've done everything, I put the pads in, I got a rotor, I did that, it's still mushy. It could be, if your motorcycles 30 or 35 years old and you've got the old rubber hose, this is a nice new Brembo hose, but the older ones they're made of more of a rubber material. If that thing's deteriorating, it's gonna do this, braided brake lines, they've got black Pearl, they got black, they got stainless, they got Chrome mite, they got whatever you want for Harley. So another thing look at how old your motorcycle is, it's a nice upgrade. I love a great brake feel, I like to have that good lever feel that's just my deal, 'cause I like brakes. I think there was something else I was gonna talk about too. The brake pad material. So okay, you can see right here, this says organic. And a lot of older motorcycles that's all they had, that's what they ran. They wore out quickly, they wore quiet. That's what a lot of people like about 'em. They make Kevlar brake pads with center material embedded in 'em 'cause they're trying to make these people happy that don't like brake noise. There's a fair amount of brake noise on a stock motorcycle. If we jacked his bike up and gave it a roll, you'd hear a. Some people fixate on that, and it drives him crazy to where I say, well I guess you better put Kevlar brake pads. There super duper expensive brake pads. You can experiment around to find the brake pad of your choice. So something to think about. Typically, for me, it always goes back to a center brake pad 'cause the longevity is so much better and the braking power is so much better, and it just brakes. So I don't fixate on brake noise, but like I said, it drives some people crazy, And oh the master cylinder, that's what I wanna touch base on. That was a big deal. 00 to 07 pretty good brake, but they did have a updated superseded part number for the master cylinder kit, the rebuild kit. So ideally here's the scenario, the guy brings it in says, "my cruise control's not working," and I go, "let's go out and look at your motorcycle." And I said, "yeah, you're gonna need a master rebuild," "to fix my cruise control?" "Yep, because your brake light's on all the time now and now my cruise control won't work because..." Or better yet when it's starting to fail, you got the brake levers attached here. You're driving down the highway and that spring is getting all clapped out because it's not pushing the lever all the way back to shut the brake light off. So then you're hitting bumps or worse yet, they got those little dangly things tied to the brake lever and it's in the wind doing this fatigue in that spring. And then the cruise control will intermittently shut off and they don't know why. Well, because the brake light's being activated. You can do it, you can follow a motorcycle down the road and you can see that brake light coming off and on and I know, huh, he needs to rebuild his front brake master cylinder 'cause it's pretty important to have a brake light on a motorcycle. So 00 to 07, go out and pull your brake in, if the lever doesn't click back all the way, I would recommend buying the OEM Master Cylinder Rebuild Kits, it comes with a little heavy duty spring now, pops that lever back. Pretty important. So that was another little tip tip, that's the one I wanted to tell you about. And let's see here. I think we kinda covered everything there. Yep. Go over here. Okay. You went out and bought an old motorcycle and somebody has, put Aftermarket components on it. Doesn't have anything that looks like this, and that's kind of common. These custom bikes, they're putting a 23 inch wheel on it or whatever, and they wanna dress it up. So they're throwing some really expensive components on here and some of them are throwing some really inexpensive components on it. So you got one extreme to the other to where it's really gonna come down to the vendor you're comfortable with, "what you're looking for?" "Is this just a trailer queen?" Where you go, oh, you know what? It's a show bike kinda. 'Cause some of them are, and they really don't care how the brake works they just want it to look cool. And that's not my deal, but I'm just saying, when it comes to the Aftermarket world, you can spend a lot of money and maybe not get great quality brakes. And if it's a really old Aftermarket brake, you're probably not even getting parts to rebuild it to where now you're like, okay, can I go back to stock? Is it even gonna allow me to, is the fork slider, what's the configuration? So Aftermarket world, you can spend a lot of money or you can buy imported stuff that's not very good and sometimes you get the same result. I've seen where it seems like the rotors tend to warp on 'em quickly. And it's unfortunate 'cause you're spending a lot of money on 'em and, but it matches your wheel. So something you gotta keep in mind. Another thing when you're putting a rotor on, and you're buying some cool guy after market rotor and then you buy these Chrome bolts, they scare me because the quality of it is usually not very desirable. So what happens is the bolt can deteriorate or brake and incrementally, yeah you can lock tight it, but if it's still, the quality of 'em, isn't that great. So for me, I like the stock stuff or I like a good quality grade eight. You're probably her off putting in a factory bolt or something similar and then getting a decorative Chrome cap to go over that bolt 'cause, especially on the rear pulley Sprocket. 'Cause that's where I do see a lot of failures. The bolt starts incrementally coming loose. You don't know it until you're far away from home and then you realize, oh my God, my whole rear wheel is deteriorated and now it's junk. So making note of that. Sometimes stock is best so. Okay, did you want to see if somebody wanted to ask a question about something or. Absolutely, ABSolutely. I think we ran the gamut here. Touched base on all your items there- Yeah, looks like it. ...the notes? Very good, very good. Well, we'd like to say thanks for folks tuning in Joel and Deb say hello, we are giving an audience to the Harley Queen. We are in the presence of royalty. I didn't know that. Mason says hello, and quite a few others. And we do have some questions. 04 soft tail soft brake lever, what's up. Well, 04 that motorcycle's almost 20 years old now. I know it sounds weird, but it's gotta be almost 18, right? So that's getting pretty old, but okay obviously if it's soft, like I was going back to the bleeding aspect, you got new brake pads, you put your new brake pads in, you looked at your rotor, the rotor, I don't know how many miles are on this bike, if it's got 50 or 60 and the rotors get worn, but at any rate, look at the rotor everything's cool there. I got new brake pads in of course, yep? All right. Now, stock brake line, and like I said, it's difficult to chase bleeding the brake on a motorcycle like that. And people struggle with it because it's not that all easy to do. So you're gonna have to, what you're gonna want to do is try and properly bleed those brakes because if it's soft, that's a good indication you still have air in the system. Try back bleeding the system, try bleeding it from the other direction. You can try and get this thing to the highest point, and rotate if when you have the cap off and obviously if it's DOT 4, you're gonna want to cover your gas tank. 'Cause guess what? DOT 4 loves to eat paint. And you can see that on any late model bike you can see how it's sweated outta there and deteriorated the paint. But more importantly at the end of the day, if you struggle and you've tried everything, you might need braided brake lines too. 'Cause the brake line is maybe starting to deteriorate so. Cool. And we have tons of video was from actually we have Evo through M8 brake bleeding, brake pad changes, so make sure to check those out in our maintenance section. You did touch base on it a little bit and I just wanna confirm, center versus organic, it's almost you're a brake you like to stop. So if there's little brake noise- Well- You're not as concerned as you're stopping better. Yeah, it's gonna come down to the year of your motorcycle. This old stuff, they just didn't have centered stuff, and they ran the organic brake pad, but anything really 84 and later I would try and get center brakes myself just because doesn't fade, it's the longevity, is twice of that and organic. I mean I've seen people, the draw to the organic brake pad is they're so cheap. And it always blows my mind that people sometimes wanna go on the internet and buy the cheapest brake pad they can get, it's like, doesn't work that way. I get that they go to the dealer and they go "55 bucks for brake pads?" Well, you don't have to necessarily go to the dealer to get a cinder brake pad, but you can find 'em Aftermarket where is at less money. But for me, if it's a later model bike, I always gotta go as centered. But if it's gonna drive me crazy, try the Kevlar, try the one that's 50 50, But the biggest thing that you said too is keep up with your maintenance, clean the rotors. Yeah. Make sure the pads are clean depending on your roads that you're driving on. So go with the better brake, cheap when you're stopping, yeah that doesn't make sense. Well, it's like I said, some of the guys are chasing the noise aspect of it. They're like, I don't care if I get 5,000, 6,000 miles, they're happy and they whatever. Exactly. It's your motorcycle experiment. Absolutely. The whole almost seems like Harley came into the ABS world four decades later than everybody else or whatever it is. Yeah. In your 20 years at your own shop and previously at dealerships, when those started to come around did you see a lot of failing units? And if so, what was the failure? Was it the unit itself or something else? Well, our deal was, for two years they had the warranty. So then, and it took about two years for 'em to start failing. They weren't necessarily failing right outta the gate, but as time on if you weren't changing your brake fluid, DOT 4 like I say is susceptible to ABSorbing moisture and deteriorating. And another thing, I guess I'm glad you brought that up cause I don't know if I mentioned that, but on a ABS motorcycle, like Nate's here, I don't know if this is have ABS or not, it doesn't look like it. At any rate you put brake pads in your ABS bike, what I like to do is actually go out, I'm on a back industrial park there's nobody around. I go out and dynamite that brake because what I'm doing is first of all, I'm testing to see if the ABS works and now I'm purging the system to where I'm activating it. And I think that's probably the biggest problem with Harley 'cause every time you start your car, the ABS cycles, it says I work and it's purge in the system. Now your motorcycle, you've probably rode it for five years and you've never had that Bambi moment or where you've had to dynamite that brake and purge that system. So really if you wanna do yourself a favor, go find a big parking lot and feel what that feels like. 'Cause ABS is really a wonderful thing. And I bet it saved a lot of lives because before ABS people never would go out and practice the emergency stop. And I recommend everybody do that if you're new or even if you've been riding a hundred years and you think you're the best motorcycle rider in the world, but if you don't utilize your front brake and your rear brake evenly in a total full on emergency situation, typically you've got a 10th of a second to react to whatever it is that's going down. And it happens if you don't have ABS that rear wheel locks up, that rear end's stepping out and you're gonna probably high side and hit the deck. And if you're going fast, it's gonna hurt. So the nice thing about ABS is you dynamite that rear brake and front brake and that motorcycle just slows down. So it's great for, even if your experienced rider ABS is great. But as far as the failures- Right. ...getting back to that, I'd say a majority of it you look at your sensors, you look at the wire harness, you see what's going on to fuse, whatever you're trying to troubleshoot it. And if it comes down to the end to where you got this gut feeling that it's the ABS unit for the most part you're tied to digital tech. But there again, they're gonna say, okay, have you been doing your maintenance? Have you been flushing your brake fluid? 'Cause I think that's the death nail on that whole unit. And this is more of a general question and opinion, I guess for you. Did you like it when Harley switched to Brembo? I guess, did you like it working on them? Did you like it as a better product, a better stopping job? Yeah, I think, I mean, like I said, this motorcycle's got an 08 and later. When they came out with it they work great. The stopping power is wonderful, they're easy to work on. My whole deal was the rotors. It seems like the rotors tend to warp sooner than normal. And I guess the other pet peeve is, and I think I see the direction and why Harley's doing it, and it's probably, if you look at the brake pad material here, these are almost virtually new. Now we go back to 00 to 07 and look at how thick those brake pads are. So every time you're getting a tire, you're getting a set of $55 brake pads, it's great marketing, but that's probably my only drawback on the Brembo. Yeah. The brake pads are so narrow to begin with. It's like what? You want, they're almost wore out. Other than that, no, the brakes wonderful. Cool. A guest says, it's not the hotel guest that's staying with you it's a guest online, "Do you need to deglaze brake pads rotors?" Deglaze, like a turkey when is deglazing. There again- Deglaze a turkey. Depending on what you subjected the bike to and how bad, I mean obviously you're gonna look at the rotor. If the rotor looks cool, I mean, if it looks like, hey, I go I put some heat into it and it's not warped and it's not all gulled up from years of use, basically you're de glazing is gonna be cleaning it with contact cleaner and a rag and cleaning it that way. I mean, if it's truly got some sort of material embedded into the rotor, yeah, I mean it's gonna come down to how bad the damage is or what's its impregnated. I know brake pads, they get that way and people do pull 'em out. They probably put 'em on a little fine piece of plate glass and maybe a little bit of a fine grit sandpaper touch 'em up that way, hit 'em with the carb spray, compressed airborne, likely, which you wouldn't wanna breathe in, but yeah, if they're glaze that way, touch 'em up, put 'em in. Good to go, I mean. Cool. Well, we're almost to the end, a couple off topic, I'm gonna give you one off topic in regards to gas stabilizer. I won't say the brand or, I guess there's what only a couple brands out there, but storage wise, how do you feel about gas stabilizers? Well, as we know, gas today is terrible. It's the longevity for fuel and a gas tank in your lawn mower is about a month and a half. Because nothing seals vent into the atmosphere and it deteriorates quickly and you go, oh man, my low speed jet's plugged on my snowblower already. Most motorcycles now are fuel injected. So it's a sealed unit, so it buys you a little more time. If you got a carburetted bike. Yeah, you clean the carburetor, and two months later that low speed is plugged again. Darn! So the only problem I have with stabilizers, I guess, depending on the vendor, sometimes I'm afraid of 'em just because if you've got a liner in the gas tank, the components in your carburetor, the accelerator, diaphragm, the inlet middle, how sensitive are they to these chemicals and this stuff? So for me, if you're gonna pickle your motorcycle, you gotta either fill it full half gas or something like that or you gotta pickle it. And you're not gonna ride it that's probably the way they go. Drain the car, fill the tank full of a really good quality fuel so that no rust can get in there. Or if you're saying, hey, I'm going to Europe for a year or whatever, then you drain it and fog it with something. But I'm not a huge fan of putting another additive in. I mean, I just, I haven't really experimented with it, 'cause I always babysit my gas tank and carburetor. Right, right. I don't want to come into that. and I've had people that they just don't ride their motorcycle much. We clean the carbon in the spring and then, "oh, this rally is gonna be in South Dakota and they drag their bike out and it doesn't idle again. And then I have quick book and I look and I say, well, you put eight miles on it going home in two months. And you had crappy gas in there and you added some fresh gas. So yeah, gas is bad. It's just not very good fuel. Cool, well, thanks for that. And I guess we'll leave on up personal note, Mason wants to know what got you into riding motorcycles. I think when it comes to riding motorcycles, you really don't have a choice. I think it's just something that how that is, you don't say, hey, I'm gonna go out and be a motorcycle one day you just or ride motorcycles. I think my whole thing was is my folks didn't want me racing, they didn't want me riding. And how that is when they say no, that means I'm gonna go full on into it. So I don't know, It's just something that's, I don't know born into it, I like it, it's just- That's there from the beginning. Yeah. At the end of the day, I always can go ride my motorcycle no matter how bad life is or whatever, I can go race my dirt bike, or I can hop on this motorcycle I hit a country road and I don't have a cell phone on me. I don't wanna talk to the anybody on the back of the bike. I just wanna go enjoy it. There you go, very good. Well, I guess we've tackled the questions. You've told us quite a bit of information. Say goodbye. Cool, all right appreciate it, man. Thanks for getting me for through my first live video. Awesome job. We'll see you next time.