Bleeding lines on new grapple install

[Oliver1655]

Like Mike476, I will prefill cylinders & the hoses before installing when possible. It doen't take long to do & it helps to eliminate the possibility of the hydraulic reservoir oil level getting too low, especially if you have several cylinders you are working with at one time. IE, like repacking all the cylinder on a loader.

 

[J_J]

There seems to be a confusion on the word [ bleeding ]

Anything you to do to expel the air is bleeding.

Manual bleeding, you remove a hose from one end of the cyl and forcing air out by causing the piston to move to the other end and then re-connecting the hose and there will be min air in that cyl.

With the cyl laying horizontal, and piston about half way, then fill the two ports with fluid until the cyl is full.

If the cyl is horizontal and you loosen the cyl port fittings, and exercise the cyl, the air will be expelled. Then re-tighten the cyl fitting.

The easiest way is to simply connect up all parts and exercise the hyd as many times as necessary to expel any air.

The volume of fluid in the cyl is sufficient to force any air through any hose, and doing this many times will BLEED the cyl circuits. Believe it of not.

Self bleeding does not mean that the air will simply go away.

Rules are rules.

 

[RKJeepXJ]

I am the OP of this thread. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and questioned the ability of a non continuous loop system with long supply lines to affectively self bleed the air back to the resevoir. I asked the question here to get real life experience on just letting multiple cycles take care of the air expulsion. I never replied back in any fashion and never said I don't believe or questioned anyone's input in this thread.

I have since hooked it all up. I did hook the supply lines in a loop to fill them with fluid and bleed that portion of the system and then left it to multiple cyclings to bleed out any air introduced by the empty lines and cylinder on the grapple. All worked well and the system doesn't seem spongey on lack in response, so yes, the air does seem to work itself out enough that it doesn't affect performance.