My son bought a 2008 Escape to fix up. Everything went fine, but there is an issue with the brake pedal being too soft.

We bled all the brakes, even ended up replacing the master cylinder. Still spongy pedal.
We removed the brake line from the master cylinder and capped it, and the pedal was solid. SO this says the issue further down from the master cylinder.
We decided to remove the ABS module and send it in for repair.

We got it back today and bled the brakes manually, and also used an Autel scanner to do an ABS brake bleed.
Still spongy.

What baffles us is when we bleed the brakes ( using a hand vacuum pump) is that air keeps coming out from all brakes.

Any suggestions?

 

It is possible there was a lot of air in the bake lines.
Also, could the connection to the vehicle brake bleeder be questionable where it may be sucking air in at that point at every bleeder?

 

That's possible about the air being sucked in at the bleeder. That last time we did that, we decided to put grease around the bleeder fitting, just in case and it made a little difference but not much.

One thing looking back, the rear brake bled like we expected (but still had a lot of bubbles), but the front brake bled very slow. The hand pump has a gauge and we could pump to 15 PSI vacuum and the rear would go to zero in a few seconds.
Both front brakes would take about 30 seconds to bleed from 15 PSI to 10 PSI.... VERY slow.

So, I guess we can just keep trying and don't stop until there is no bubbles? I have bled alot of brakes and this really baffles me.

 

Did you find a solution to this? I'm experiencing the exact same problem. My daughter just bought an 08 Escape 3.0L, and the previous owner had the brakes bled and master cylinder replaced a week prior to the sale. I felt the spongy pedal when we test drove, but I figured a simple brake bleed would solve it. It has been bled again, but pedal is still soft. Requires about 8 out of 10 pedal travel before it begins to stop. The shop that did the work said I need to go to a dealer.

Any updates or insight would be appreciated!

 

We are not sure what the issue was, but it may have been a bad ABS brake module.
We sent it in for repair for something like $250. They said the replaced the pump.

Then we re- installed the ABS module and bled it.
Then we used an Autel again for automatic brake bleed.
Still did not work, so we left it sitting for 2 weeks.

Then we loosened up the brake lines to the master cylinder and pushed on the brake pedal to push out the air that might have been trapped in the front brake line.
That fixed the problem. How that worked, I don't know, but my son saw a suggestion on Youtube and we figured, nothing to lose by trying it.

 

It was probably air in the system the whole time.If it were me, I would go to a large parking lot at a shopping center very early in the morning where you could SAFELY do a couple panic stops on wet pavement to test the system.