Hi,
This is an FYI. At my last annual on my 235, I decided to have the brake lines replaced since they were starting to weep a bit. Bleeding them afterwards turned into a royal nightmare. There are many posts in this forum about bleeding Cherokee brakes and we tried all of them. We also rebuilt the master cylinders. We also called every Piper shop we could think of. No fluid was coming out, but we kept getting bubbles for over 40 hours of bleeding, then when we finally stopped getting bubbles, they were still spongy.
It turns out that the new brake lines were stretching whenever we pumped the brakes. I had the A&P grab a line with both hands while I pushed the brakes, and his hands moved apart from each other, so the lines were stretching. We suspect that this is what made bleeding them so much more painful than we expected, even for Piper brakes.
These were the black Stratoflex lines from Avial (on table in attached photo). We replaced these brand-new lines with a set of steel-braided lines with a blue coating, also from Avial, and that solved the problem. No more spongy lines.
This is an FYI. At my last annual on my 235, I decided to have the brake lines replaced since they were starting to weep a bit. Bleeding them afterwards turned into a royal nightmare. There are many posts in this forum about bleeding Cherokee brakes and we tried all of them. We also rebuilt the master cylinders. We also called every Piper shop we could think of. No fluid was coming out, but we kept getting bubbles for over 40 hours of bleeding, then when we finally stopped getting bubbles, they were still spongy.
It turns out that the new brake lines were stretching whenever we pumped the brakes. I had the A&P grab a line with both hands while I pushed the brakes, and his hands moved apart from each other, so the lines were stretching. We suspect that this is what made bleeding them so much more painful than we expected, even for Piper brakes.
These were the black Stratoflex lines from Avial (on table in attached photo). We replaced these brand-new lines with a set of steel-braided lines with a blue coating, also from Avial, and that solved the problem. No more spongy lines.
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