BRAKE FLUID

Bob's right, 5606 and its colored RED to keep us dummies
straight. My Genesis uses it also as does most ships
that use Cleveland brakes except Grob, but they always
were different.
:( JJ

At 17:42 13 October 2004, Bob Kuykendall wrote:
Earlier, Ventus B wrote:

The maintenance manual for my ASW 20C glider
says to be sure to only use 'mineral oil' based
brake fluid for the hydraulic brake system.

MIL-5606 is pretty much the standard mineral-based
hydraulic fluid for aircraft applications. It costs
about $6/quart from Aircraft Spruce:

http://www.aircraftspruce.com/menus/...omponents.html

As far as I can tell, DOT 3 and DOT 4 brake fluids
are glycol based, and DOT 5 is silicone based
according to my 15 minutes of research on
the internet. The problem is, I still can't tell
if any
of these meet Schleicher's admonition to only use
mineral oil based brake fluid. I would suspect
that of the three, that the DOT 5 silicone based
fluid appears to be the right one. Can anyone
corroborate this? Anybody know the 'right'
answer?

When I cobbled together a brake system for my HP-18
using Yamaha and Cleveland brake parts, I decided to
use a silicone brake fluid as well. It was the only
thing I knew (from experience) to be compatible with
both the DOT 3-compatible seals of the master cylinder
and the MIL 5606-compatible seals in the caliper.

Getting slightly off-topic, I'm betting that we're
T-minus a few minutes to a cap-locked post about how
silicone should never be allowed with 50 meters of
a composite strucure, or else it will never be repairable.
I've heard plenty of folks say that, but I have not
seen any substantiation in any of the composite glider
repair manuals I've read.

Thanks, and best regards to all

Bob K.
http://www.hpaircraft.com/hp-24