Morning folks,

I noticed my front brake lever was feeling a little spongy so gave them a good bleed, installed new pads etc but after doing so, it’s still not great.

There’s way more lever throw before the pads seem to bite compared to the other lever.  In fact the lever is coming all the way back to the bar without too much effort.

I’m confident there’s no air in the system, bleed block etc was used.  Any ideas what it could be?  Almost as if there isn’t enough oil in the system?

I’ve had to increase the lever reach as a workaround in the meantime.

Sounds like you may need to bleed it again. Sounds like you may not have pressurised the system when you bled it.

Is it spongy after the pads contact the disc, or is it just a lot of dead travel before contact?

If it’s the latter, it sounds like the pistons aren’t advancing properly.  Try applying the brakes repeatedly and firmly, or try the trick of tying the lever back to the bar leave it.

If it’s spongy then you’ve still got air in it.

When did it start feeling spongy – was it in use or after storage?  Unless you’ve got a leak in your brakes, they won’t suddenly take on air and need a bleed.  What can happen is that if you store it on a wall or upside down, air that was sitting harmlessly in the reservoir at the top can make it into the brake lines.  Repeatedly applying or flicking the brakes usually sorts it pretty quickly.

I noticed there was a lot of lever throw before the pads bite in the first instance so I guess it wasn’t spongy as such.

The pads were worn right down so I put it down to this and installed new pads but that didn’t make any difference to the amount of lever throw.  There’s just a lot of dead travel.

The bike hasn’t been stored and is used often.  I’ll try tying the lever back for a while see if that helps.