Bleeding the Hydraulic Clutch Circuit on Maria

The speedbleeder for my R1150RT's Clutch Circuit arrived last week and I finally had some time today to go put it in and bleed the clutch circuit on Maria.

I was following the great instructions/guide put out by Jamie of BMWSportTouring.com. LINK

The procedure is pretty straightforward actually. I only ran into one issue that had me puzzled and frustrated for a bit. The speedbleeder apparently is a little bit too long and the pointy end trying to push back the check valve ball on the motorcycle's clutch filler adapter is difficult if not impossible to do without damaging something!

I had been referencing the printout I had made of Jamies' article and had not printed out the commentary that usually follows his work. I went back online and re-read the whole thing and found that others had not only run into the same issue with the speedbleeder valve but there were two options to get around this. I had also emailed Jamie and he'd actually responded at same time I was discovering these solutions proposing same thing! Wow, now there's a guy who stands by his postings! Thanks Jamie!

So there two options are:

A. File down the pointy end of the speedbleeder so that the threads get a chance to "bite" into the filler adapter's threads. Tried it, did not work, risked stripping things, so I did B.

B. Remove the filler adapter, which is apparently there to make it easy at the BMW factory to put fluid into the clutch circuit! Put the speedbleeder in its place, which goes in nicely and voila, the sucker is in place and you're ready to bleed the circuit easy as you please! Speedbleeders, as I've written before, are the bomb! : )

I looked at the stuff that came out as I started bleeding the circuit and it looked same color as the new fluid so I only ran half a bottle of fluid into the system. I only had one bottle of brake fluid you see, and did not want to risk running out. I also wanted to have some "reserve" just in case even though the fluid starts absorbing oxygen at this point and can't be kept for long.

The rest of the process was easy, got everything filled up, tightened back down and cleaned up with no issues. Can't do a test ride today though, there's snow falling outside and the roads look icy. I'll wait till tomorrow when the sun hopefully burns the snow/ice that's falling today off.