Has anyone got any experience with Monster 821 front brakes at all? My 2018 front has a lot of travel in it, and only get's worse when it's not used. For instance it sat for two days recently and the lever went straight to the bar. I'm told 'they all do that' but seems a bit crap for a modern bike to have such poor brakes. Thanks,
Is it adjustable? If so, wind out as far as you can while making it still usable. Does it have remote reservoir? If so, bleed the top nipple.
It does, Already wound all the way out, as for bleeding I was going to do so and replace with some 5.1 as I have better experiences with that anyway, just concerned that I'm going to end up bleeding it every day, I've not bought a MV afterall.
I suspect you have a coffin type mc. Not a remote one. On multi, it would often need a bleed at the mc end nipple every 1000 or so miles
I had the same problem on my Evo, had tried bleeding from all nipples on several occasions, slightly better but still soft lever movement, but did pump up after a couple of applications. Intended to change the M/C so started to drain the system through front R/H nipple, instead of my normal bleeding method, I just opened the nipple to drain and suddenly got a lot of air through, closed the nipple and brake was fine, topped up reservoir, no more bleeding and brake has stayed firm since last year. I suspect that because of the extra pipework with ABS it needs far more fluid movement to get any air to the nipple. Worth a try before replacing M/C !
@theelectrichen Whoever told you they all do that is talking bollox . I have the mechanical ability of a 3 toed sloth but having owned an 821 previously I can confirm that the brakes were every bit as good as you would hope for on a modern bike and felt the same on the first day of ownership as the last.
I'd had a wander round the shop floor and tried all of them, some levers were rock solid, other went straight to the bar, seems to be a lottery!
You would hope that the brakes would all be sorted before getting to the customers. I mainly ride the older air cooled bikes but both the 821 I mentioned earlier and a 1200 I currently own had/have excellent brakes. Where did you buy it from ?
Blade in Oxford, so they're not a secondhand dealer or anything, to their credit they did take it off my hands and ran it through some tests/a bleed, but now it's back I'm less than impressed.
Do you want to give them another chance to fix it properly ? I must admit I`d be very pissed off to have got the "they all do that" line. That is quite pathetic .
I need to have my CEL reset too (Unplugged the exhaust valve to confirm my theory regarding the power curve) so they can have another crack again, when they had a look the first time it did help, but now it's back again I should imagine they'll understand. I hope.
Some people have success with the 'cable-tie tick' - tying the lever back overnight. It sounds silly but can work.
Good luck . I`d be tempted to email them in advance explaining the brake problem, what you were told & what you expect.
It helps to get the ABS triggered as this “self bleeds” any air in the pump so I’m told - seems to work on the rear brake on my 1200R.
Why would ABS have any effect upon the travel of the brake lever? Or "self bleed" any air in the system? It merely opens a valve which releases the pressure on the pads thus allowing the disk rotor to rotate again. As soon as the disk rotor rotates the valve closes again thus pressure increases on the pads again. Admittedly this happens very quickly 10-15x per second. All this happens in a sealed system, so there's no way air can get bled out under this process. The lever travels all the way back because there is either not enough fluid in the system or air trapped in the fluid in the system which, despite best efforts, has not been fully expelled. Bleed the system from the callipers. On the road there is no appreciable difference between 5 and 4 brake fluid. The difference is that 5 has a higher boiling point which is only useful if you're doing a lot of track-days and continually very heavy breaking on the track.
