[georgewny]

Folks
It's been 2 years and 4 months (and about 10,000 miles) since I changed the brake fluid on my 2011 E90 335IX.

And having done past brake fluid refreshes with my trusted hand held Mighty-Vac pump.

Well, quite frankly you have to pump the Mighty-Vac so many times and so fast that I'd typically get a sore hand or a cramp!

So I said, enough is enough!

I decided to hook up my cheap Harbor Freight A/C vacuum pump to a Pickle Jar via some tubing from Home Depot and a few 1/4 inch fittings.

What you see in the pictures below is the empty can of new DOT 4 brake fluid from FCP Euro, the old fluid from my car in the pickle jar and the A/C vacuum pump.

I did the classic, starting at Right Rear, Left Rear, Right Front, Left Front.

All I did was clean around the bleeder valve with a brass wire brush and then applied some grease around the base of the bleeder valve to avoid having air enter into the system or vacuum escape when I opened the valve.

The vacuum gauge is not needed, I just want to see how much vacuum I was drawing.
The gauge stayed pegged at it's max of 30 inches of Mercury. So obviously it was drawing a vacuum greater then that!

This was super easy to create, super easy to use!
No Mess, No pumping the heck out of a hand held vacuum pump.
And the tube I just connected it directly to the bleeder valve stem, no fittings for the car/bleeder valve side. Just slip the tube onto the bleeder valve nipple.

Neat, clean and easy!

The pictures below are after I had completed the job, so you can see the old brake fluid and the contraption I created!

[Brian86]

Vacuum pumps come in handy. I used that same harbor freight pump to purge and restore a charcoal canister for my e36 after flooding my old one from too much track and not enough street driving.