I've been meaning to clean up my caliper because the outside paint is worn and there are spots with surface corrosion, in preparation for this, I was working on freeing the bleeder screws that we pretty much all stuck. I managed to free them and was rotating them a half turn back and forth to clean the threads so I could do my repair later.

Here were it gets nasty: I put on the wheels to go for a drive and I feel the pedal sink so I know someting is up. I put the car on stands and I notice the front wheel is soaked in brake fluid! For some reason, although I closed the bleeder finger tight, it obviously wasn't closed enough, so i quickly go to bleed the brakes and I was able to poor about 1/3 of the small bottles of honda dot3 into the master cylinder so I fear that I might have gotten air in there.

My pedal now has more travel than usual and pumping the brakes doesn't reduce the travel of the pedal like before. I'm guessing this means I have air in my system perhaps even in the master cylinder...

What can I do? Is a bench bleed the only way? I don't think I ran the MC dry since I could only put less than 1/2 a small bottle of Honda DOT3 in there. I've seen people on youtube run a hose from the valve all the way into the MC. Please help!

 

Your bleeder screw may not be sealing allowing air to be sucked in upon release of the brake pedal. If you had MC low to the point of no fluid in reservoir some air may get into the system (ABS). In this case find and empty lot ir road and brake hard to activate ABS. this will purge air from the unit. Then bleed all four wheels per procedure