One other thing, use the nice ceramic (red) pads that came with the bike.  The pads that come with the new calipers are not very good.

As one of the first mods I did the swap to hydraulic brakes on my radrunner plus.    This is a kit from Big Game that comes with the new brake levers, and brake calipers that is surprisingly cheap.  You re-use the rotors and the caliper mounts.   There is a good install video, which was very helpful, but I would rate this an 8/10 in difficulty, especially if you have a front rack.   It took me a solid half day to do it.     Having a pre-bled kit was really nice as far as hydraulic installs go!

I live on a steep hill in San Francisco and have a passenger, so I get to put the brakes to the test.    I find these probably don't shorten the stopping distance much, but maybe will help on fade.  They feel great.  The rear is a bit squeaky now, I'm guessing the new pads are more metalic than the olds.   Hopefully it beds in and stops being so loud.

Some thoughts...

• Do the trick where you tape the new brake hose to the old brake CABLE to pull the housing through the frame, worked great
• The rear hose is a bit too long, so it doesn't route with the rest of the cables well.  I added electrical tape to the outside of the hose where it interferes with my front basket.  This is just for abrasion resistance.  If I had the patience to bleed it I would shorten it a bit
• The front hose needs to be routed through the handle bar and from behind, as well as some strategic zip-ties along the handle bar to make sure that at "full lock" the hose doesn't interfere with the stock front rack.   This was one of the more tricky bits.
• You re-use all the existing caliper brackets and bolts, nothing off the new ones.  This isn't clear in the video
• Centering the brakes so they don't drag is always tedious (for any disc brake).   It's not just a matter of "clamp and screw" like people make it out to be.  It took a lot of fiddling but in the end was good.  I found I had to eyeball it and tweak it while the wheel was spinning, get it set, and then clamp down gently and make it tight little by little.

-m

Here is my hoopty way to jack up the rear wheel.  I needed to recenter the brakes for the new hydraulic calipers I installed.

pic :

-m

I've got a RadRunner Plus and I don't like the shifter on top of the bar, I prefer Shimano "rapid fire" under the bar MTB shifters, so I got a 7 speed one and gave it a shot.   It didn't work out, but I thought I would leave this here for the next person. 

Pic:

Pic:

Pic

Unfortunately the throttle housing interferes with the up-shifter.  The shifter also cannot slide far to the left because the cable housing hits the curve in the handlebar.    This mod would work if you swapped the throttle to the LHS, but I thought that would be too awkward after years of riding motos.

-m