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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Friday, September 09, 2011 at 18:41:42 :
In Reply to: OT: silicone brake fluid change over ??? posted by ChrisCase [67.121.210.113] on Friday, September 09, 2011 at 16:28:07 :
All the DOT 5 I have seen, at least in military vehicles, is dyed purple. If yours is purple, it's certainly silicone. I don't know if the civilian stuff is dyed or not. "Cloudy and sludgy" sounds more like DOT 3, but for all we know some previous owner might have mixed 3 and 5 in the system and that's why it's ugly. In any case it sounds like it needs to be bled. There's a lot of folklore out there about the incompatibility and the need to completely remove all traces of DOT 3 from the system when putting in DOT 5, but I prefer to believe the guys who say that a little bit of DOT 3 residue on the insides of the lines and cylinders is okay. DOT 5 is not automatically better than DOT 3 unless it's a high-performance application where the system gets so hot that water absorbed in the DOT 3 could boil. DOT 5 doesn't absorb water but that's both good and bad. The bad part is that any water in the system will find its way to a low spot and sit there, rusting out that part of the line faster than the same amount of water distributed throughout the system in DOT 3 would do.
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