Honda Motorcycle Brakes Won’t Pressurize After Bleeding

If the brakes on your Honda motorcycle won’t pressurize after bleeding them, what could be the problem? You might need to do a brake master cylinder rebuild to fix the issue.

Partzilla’s Honda motorcycle expert John Talley livestreams Q&A sessions on our YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm Eastern. In this session, John was asked what could be causing the brakes on a Honda motorcycle to not pressurize after being bled.

Honda motorcycle brake bleed

Honda Brakes Won’t Pressurize After Bleeding Q&A

I have an issue with my Honda motorcycle brakes, which won't pressurize after hours of bleeding. Any suggestions?

John Talley: I would wonder if you’re having an issue with the master cylinder, especially with the Hondas. They’ve got rebuild kits for all of their clutches and their brakes. They’re really good about that. I would say you probably need to pull it apart and see if the seal is broken down. Honda makes kits that come with the O-ring, the seal, the plunger and the springs and the whole nine yards. My only question is how are you bleeding it? If you’re just bleeding it using the brake itself, I’ve seen that method not work before. But the one that I’ve seen work every single time is to use some kind of vacuum pump to pull down the brake fluid through it. So you may want to invest in one of those. We sell a couple of different ones … but it doesn’t matter which one. Just any vacuum type system you can hook up and draw the fluid through should work.