Formula K24 problems

I have had my k24’s for nearly a year and they have been great until recently.

They seemed to lose all power, so i put it down to sticky pistons, which seems to be common at this time of year. So on inspection I decided to replace the pistons and seals myself as it isn’t the most diffficult job. However now the lever feel on the rear is terrible. Firstly it bits almost at the point where the lever meets the bar and secondly when it does it feels super spongy.

Now is this a case of maybe letting the new bits bed in and hopefully a rebleed will cure the feel or is it something else. I have just ordered new pads to try and encourage it to work better and will bleed the system then anyway. I don’t think I did a bad job on the piston installation as the front feels fine!

Anyone else suffering problems with these brakes? I’d very much like to hear any comments people may have.

Ta

Rhid

My K24’s were great for about the first 4 months then I had a problem with the levers where they almost came to the bar before they would work. Not being technically adept at fixing brakes & the fact they were still under warranty I went back to my lbs. Cutting a long story short the lbs returned them to Propel (?) who checked them out & apparently there was a known problem with one of the seals in the master cylinder reacting to the brake fluid which caused this, they changed the seals & hey presto they are working fine once again. Not sure whether this is similar to your problem but you might want to check with Propel just in case especially if they are still under warranty.

Thanks for that. I have contacted my LBS and they are going to sort out a return to propel for a check up. How old were your brakes? Mine are about 11 months old!Oh I hope the warrant is still valid!

Glad to be of some help.

I bought my bike brand new & it was after about 4 months when it all kicked off. Propel are aware of this seal problem & should fix it FOC even if the warranty has expired as a goodwill gesture. I hope you get them sorted soon.

It does sound a lot like my problems! What makes it worse is that I have been to shops and played with Oro brakes and they feel sooo nice! It was a right pain to have to go back to mine crappy feeling ones.

I was looking at these brakes, and then emailed Formula, this was the response I got.

dear Mr. ………. ,

if you use the correct DOT 4 Fluid you won’t face this kind of problems.
We always recommend to ALWAYS use DOT 4 fluid

if you use a different fluid from DOT 4 The Seals in the caliper can be affected

So for our experience ther is no problem on our K24 brakes

Pls revert to us for any other problem

Best Regards
Formula srl

Return to Toby at Propel, he’s really helpful. I had the same problem that Crispy Bacon describes – the material on the seals on some early K24’s was of the wrong type and eventually broke down due to reacting with DOT4

I sent them back to the shop they came from and they replaced the master cylinder seals and they work fine. So thats that really. I’m not massively impressed that the seals needed replacing after under a year of use but the brakes do work very well so I suppose I will have to live with it.