The Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9 with 45mm high rims that I was able to assemble both front and rear wheels for as of yesterday's post was picked up right away.
The customer brought in a complete Specialized Tarmac that they bought at Kanzaki Suita shop,
and they want to sell off the Roval wheels that came with it as near-new stock with only installation history for sprocket and disc rotor on auction,
so they haven't ridden it at all until we swap it to the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9.
So we moved the disc rotor and sprocket to the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9
（and didn't remove the tires since we switched to Continental Grand Prix 5000）
and attached it to the Tarmac frameset, but when squeezing the right brake lever,
the shift lever was about to touch the bar tape because the lever pull was so deep—extremely dangerous.
The left brake lever was better than the right, but compared to normal bleeding condition,
the lever pull was still very deep.
Both front and rear had brand new brake pads, yet there was a left-right difference in lever pull, and even the better side was out of the question.
At the customer's request, Kanzaki had adjusted the initial position of the brake levers to be closer to the handlebar,
but even accounting for that, the brake lever pull was deep and the feel when squeezing was mushy.
I told the customer "If the brake pads wear down even a little bit, I think the brakes will fail and you'll die,"
and that's when they decided we should fix it here at the shop.
Reading up to this point, some might think
"Kanzaki just does seventy-percent assembly out of the box, tightening stem bolts and attaching pedals—the problem is Specialized's assembly factory,"
but in this case, that's definitely not the issue.
If I write this, I think the customer will be identifiable to Kanzaki Suita shop staff, but
the reason is that the Tarmac they brought in had its left and right brakes swapped before delivery per customer request,
so it was set up as left front/right rear.
In other words, doing maintenance theater as a "service" resulted in a worse state
than simply handing over the bike straight out of the box.
I wish the staff member who did this in place of the customer would die.
My guess is that they just loosened the hose-fixing bolt on the brake lever side, cut the hose to the absolute minimum length to fit a new olive, and then swapped left and right again and tightened the hose-fixing bolt—that's it.
Any shop mechanic should be able to squeeze the brake lever and recognize that the pull is abnormally deep for a customer bike, and the fact that there's a clear left-right difference in that depth without resolving it is also a problem.
First, I decided to fix just the worse right brake lever.
I removed the rear wheel of the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9 and the rear brake pads,
attached a bleeding block to the brake caliper,
flushed brake fluid in with a syringe from the brake side,
and squeezed the brake lever repeatedly with a funnel attached to the lever until no more air bubbles came out.
Up to this point follows the manufacturer's manual procedure, and the actual feel when squeezing the brake lever improved quite a bit,
but from here on, I'll write about a method for removing additional air that goes beyond the manual.
↑This is an actual photo from the customer's bike.
We tilt the funnel by lowering the front of the bike like this and squeeze the brake lever repeatedly.
The amount of fluid in the funnel has
a lower limit of just enough to see a bubble pop out,
and an upper limit of where tilting the funnel won't spill fluid.
The previous image is close to the lower limit, but this is plenty.
After pushing a sufficient amount of air-free brake fluid from the syringe side to the lever side,
squeezing the brake lever repeatedly will cause air bubbles to pop out.
But after a while, no matter how many times you squeeze the lever,
no more bubbles emerge.
Up to that point, as I mentioned earlier, it's per the manufacturer's manual,
but if you then tilt the funnel and squeeze the lever repeatedly,
sometimes more air bubbles come out
（though sometimes they don't）.
But if you then return the funnel to horizontal and squeeze the lever again,
air bubbles that absolutely didn't come out before tilting and squeezing
now suddenly appear from deep inside when you compress the lever,
and after squeezing a few times, they pop out.
Early in this process, you might see two or three bubbles this size come out.
Once you confirm that the funnel is horizontal and no bubbles emerge after dozens of squeezes,
tilt the funnel back to the previous angle again
and squeeze the lever while tilted.
As I mentioned, sometimes no bubbles come out when tilting and squeezing,
but after doing that, if you return the funnel to horizontal
and squeeze the lever, you'll see another bubble pop out again.
Repeating this tilted-squeeze→horizontal-squeeze→... cycle
until no bubbles emerge during horizontal squeezes represents a more complete bleeding state.
If you do this, the click and firmness of the brake lever pull is completely different,
and the period where it maintains that initial performance is also much longer.
I'm not sure why this method continues to produce more bubbles, but my guess is
that in the corner of the master cylinder, there's a pocket of air
that only comes out when you tilt the lever bracket to this angle and squeeze,
（if you were just replacing the air in the reservoir tank with fluid,
the brake feel wouldn't change, so air deeper than that must be getting purged）.
Since I don't want to photograph the customer's frame,
I'll recreate it on my own bike, but
the bike angle when tilting the funnel is roughly like the image above.
Since I have SRAM brakes, I never do this myself.
By the way, the maintenance stand in the photo is a Park Tool PRS-25.
So the right lever on the customer's Tarmac,
which had a desperately deep (←not exaggerating) pull,
became a normal lever pull amount with a firm, click-y feel,
and the left lever, which was supposedly better, now felt abnormally deep by comparison.
If we could achieve this feel and lever pull on the rear brake, which has longer hose and is harder to bleed,
then have Kanzaki do the front brake—but don't teach them the funnel-tilting method I just showed you.
You can say the rear brake was done by Nomunomu Lab,
and if possible, tell them that if they can't maintain the same level of work,
they should take down their pro shop sign and die,
the customer asked me to convey—but
the front brake ended up being done at our shop too.
I really wanted to see if Kanzaki could do it
The funnel-tilting squeeze method is
genuinely effective, so if you're using Shimano levers,
definitely give it a try.
Note: I had written the funnel tilt as "oil surface tilt," but I received the entirely fair point that "the oil surface stays horizontal even if the funnel tilts," so I've corrected that.
Thanks for the comment.
Bonus
At our shop in the past, we've had cases where
the bike was upside-down or on its side for extended periods during transport or bike-packing,
causing air to get into the hose and making the lever pull deep and mushy,
or where a complete bike with a mushy brake lever feel from the start needed improvement,
and we've fixed them using only the funnel-tilting squeeze method
without worrying about brake pad wear or brake piston stroke,
without even attaching a syringe to the caliper side—just with the funnel on the lever side.
There are many examples like this.
Lots of people have probably seen their own bikes at our shop tilted to the angle shown in the image above.
When fixing the front brake, since we don't remove the front wheel,
you need a maintenance stand that can raise the bike quite high.
Alternatively, for front brakes, you could remove the front wheel, insert a dummy rotor (pad spacer)
between the pads, and work that way.
The funnel-tilting squeeze method won't reduce the clearance between pads and rotor compared to before the work,
but if the pads are worn—meaning
the brake caliper pistons are extended—and you fill the brake system with fluid,
when you later replace the pads with new ones and retract the pistons before opening the lever-side bolt,
fluid might leak out. So it's recommended to have paper towels ready
or to attach the funnel before retracting the pistons.
With this method, there are quite a few cases where, even accounting for pad wear, the lever stroke has a left-right difference,
and if you only fix the side with deeper pull,
the other side becomes noticeably deeper by comparison, so
you end up fixing both left and right anyway.
The customer brought in a complete Specialized Tarmac that they bought at Kanzaki Suita shop,
and they want to sell off the Roval wheels that came with it as near-new stock with only installation history for sprocket and disc rotor on auction,
so they haven't ridden it at all until we swap it to the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9.
So we moved the disc rotor and sprocket to the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9
（and didn't remove the tires since we switched to Continental Grand Prix 5000）
and attached it to the Tarmac frameset, but when squeezing the right brake lever,
the shift lever was about to touch the bar tape because the lever pull was so deep—extremely dangerous.
The left brake lever was better than the right, but compared to normal bleeding condition,
the lever pull was still very deep.
Both front and rear had brand new brake pads, yet there was a left-right difference in lever pull, and even the better side was out of the question.
At the customer's request, Kanzaki had adjusted the initial position of the brake levers to be closer to the handlebar,
but even accounting for that, the brake lever pull was deep and the feel when squeezing was mushy.
I told the customer "If the brake pads wear down even a little bit, I think the brakes will fail and you'll die,"
and that's when they decided we should fix it here at the shop.
Reading up to this point, some might think
"Kanzaki just does seventy-percent assembly out of the box, tightening stem bolts and attaching pedals—the problem is Specialized's assembly factory,"
but in this case, that's definitely not the issue.
If I write this, I think the customer will be identifiable to Kanzaki Suita shop staff, but
the reason is that the Tarmac they brought in had its left and right brakes swapped before delivery per customer request,
so it was set up as left front/right rear.
In other words, doing maintenance theater as a "service" resulted in a worse state
than simply handing over the bike straight out of the box.
My guess is that they just loosened the hose-fixing bolt on the brake lever side, cut the hose to the absolute minimum length to fit a new olive, and then swapped left and right again and tightened the hose-fixing bolt—that's it.
Any shop mechanic should be able to squeeze the brake lever and recognize that the pull is abnormally deep for a customer bike, and the fact that there's a clear left-right difference in that depth without resolving it is also a problem.
First, I decided to fix just the worse right brake lever.
I removed the rear wheel of the Nomunomu Lab Wheel #9 and the rear brake pads,
attached a bleeding block to the brake caliper,
flushed brake fluid in with a syringe from the brake side,
and squeezed the brake lever repeatedly with a funnel attached to the lever until no more air bubbles came out.
Up to this point follows the manufacturer's manual procedure, and the actual feel when squeezing the brake lever improved quite a bit,
but from here on, I'll write about a method for removing additional air that goes beyond the manual.
↑This is an actual photo from the customer's bike.
We tilt the funnel by lowering the front of the bike like this and squeeze the brake lever repeatedly.
The amount of fluid in the funnel has
a lower limit of just enough to see a bubble pop out,
and an upper limit of where tilting the funnel won't spill fluid.
The previous image is close to the lower limit, but this is plenty.
After pushing a sufficient amount of air-free brake fluid from the syringe side to the lever side,
squeezing the brake lever repeatedly will cause air bubbles to pop out.
But after a while, no matter how many times you squeeze the lever,
no more bubbles emerge.
Up to that point, as I mentioned earlier, it's per the manufacturer's manual,
but if you then tilt the funnel and squeeze the lever repeatedly,
sometimes more air bubbles come out
（though sometimes they don't）.
But if you then return the funnel to horizontal and squeeze the lever again,
air bubbles that absolutely didn't come out before tilting and squeezing
now suddenly appear from deep inside when you compress the lever,
and after squeezing a few times, they pop out.
Early in this process, you might see two or three bubbles this size come out.
Once you confirm that the funnel is horizontal and no bubbles emerge after dozens of squeezes,
tilt the funnel back to the previous angle again
and squeeze the lever while tilted.
As I mentioned, sometimes no bubbles come out when tilting and squeezing,
but after doing that, if you return the funnel to horizontal
and squeeze the lever, you'll see another bubble pop out again.
Repeating this tilted-squeeze→horizontal-squeeze→... cycle
until no bubbles emerge during horizontal squeezes represents a more complete bleeding state.
If you do this, the click and firmness of the brake lever pull is completely different,
and the period where it maintains that initial performance is also much longer.
I'm not sure why this method continues to produce more bubbles, but my guess is
that in the corner of the master cylinder, there's a pocket of air
that only comes out when you tilt the lever bracket to this angle and squeeze,
（if you were just replacing the air in the reservoir tank with fluid,
the brake feel wouldn't change, so air deeper than that must be getting purged）.
Since I don't want to photograph the customer's frame,
I'll recreate it on my own bike, but
the bike angle when tilting the funnel is roughly like the image above.
Since I have SRAM brakes, I never do this myself.
By the way, the maintenance stand in the photo is a Park Tool PRS-25.
So the right lever on the customer's Tarmac,
which had a desperately deep (←not exaggerating) pull,
became a normal lever pull amount with a firm, click-y feel,
and the left lever, which was supposedly better, now felt abnormally deep by comparison.
If we could achieve this feel and lever pull on the rear brake, which has longer hose and is harder to bleed,
then have Kanzaki do the front brake—but don't teach them the funnel-tilting method I just showed you.
You can say the rear brake was done by Nomunomu Lab,
and if possible, tell them that if they can't maintain the same level of work,
they should take down their pro shop sign and die,
the customer asked me to convey—but
the front brake ended up being done at our shop too.
The funnel-tilting squeeze method is
genuinely effective, so if you're using Shimano levers,
definitely give it a try.
Note: I had written the funnel tilt as "oil surface tilt," but I received the entirely fair point that "the oil surface stays horizontal even if the funnel tilts," so I've corrected that.
Thanks for the comment.
Bonus
At our shop in the past, we've had cases where
the bike was upside-down or on its side for extended periods during transport or bike-packing,
causing air to get into the hose and making the lever pull deep and mushy,
or where a complete bike with a mushy brake lever feel from the start needed improvement,
and we've fixed them using only the funnel-tilting squeeze method
without worrying about brake pad wear or brake piston stroke,
without even attaching a syringe to the caliper side—just with the funnel on the lever side.
There are many examples like this.
Lots of people have probably seen their own bikes at our shop tilted to the angle shown in the image above.
When fixing the front brake, since we don't remove the front wheel,
you need a maintenance stand that can raise the bike quite high.
Alternatively, for front brakes, you could remove the front wheel, insert a dummy rotor (pad spacer)
between the pads, and work that way.
The funnel-tilting squeeze method won't reduce the clearance between pads and rotor compared to before the work,
but if the pads are worn—meaning
the brake caliper pistons are extended—and you fill the brake system with fluid,
when you later replace the pads with new ones and retract the pistons before opening the lever-side bolt,
fluid might leak out. So it's recommended to have paper towels ready
or to attach the funnel before retracting the pistons.
With this method, there are quite a few cases where, even accounting for pad wear, the lever stroke has a left-right difference,
and if you only fix the side with deeper pull,
the other side becomes noticeably deeper by comparison, so
you end up fixing both left and right anyway.