Who has made your own brake lines?

[Fuzzyhead]

I need to replace my crusty brake lines, but paying $200-$300 for pre-bent lines seems crazy to me.
I've been looking into making my own lines out of some steel or stainless steel tubing.
You can get 25 feet of 3/16" steel tubing for $22. Plus a few tools and stuff to cut and flare the lines.

Here's a good article: http://www.eastwood.com/brake_article

Has anyone made their own?

[1972hiboy]

all i can say is practice makes perfect. and good quality tools matter for this job. i usually make all my own lines so this way I can adapt the line for the application at hand. even with pre-bent lines you will have to manipulate them a bit anyway. Id say dive in.

[fireguywtc]

I did it on my 67. It is not hard but it takes time and patients. I agree with buying a good double flaring tool with tube benders. However, found that the double flaring was the hardest thing to get right. It takes time and care, but I still had a leak on mine (under pressure). Those flares have to be perfect.

[ultraranger]

I've fabricated numerous brake lines for various brake conversions on vehicles.

Lines I made for a '67 Mustang when I converted the front drums to discs.



Vacuum and fuel line on the same '67 Mustang.



Brake lines I made when I converted a friend's '65 F100 from a single reservoir master cylinder to a dual master cylinder.



Brake lines I did on a '56 Chevy Belair that belonged to my friend's dad.



Manual line lock I installed in a '65 Mustang.



...here, I was fabbing up one of the lines for the manual line lock.



...it went from the engine compartment, through the firewall and into the interior of the Mustang.



Late model Mustang ('99-'04) 4-wheel disc MC I installed and plumbed into a 1965 Mustang, after I converted the rear to '94-'04 Mustang rear discs.



New hard line I made for the rear end in my '69 Ranger.



New brake line I fabricated on an '80 Mercury Monarch 9-inch rear end, that I was converting from drum brakes to '94-'04 Cobra rear discs.



...11.65" Cobra rear brake assemblies installed.



I typically buy 60" straight sticks of 3/16" hard line from the parts stores to make my lines from. Coiled tubing can be difficult to work with, since it's not easy to get the curve completely out of the tubing. At times, a 60" straight stick of brake tubing can be a handful to work with --depending on the complexity of the bends and offsets that may need to be made.

Quality tools are also key to getting professional looking results and for ease of making bends and double flares. Cheap tools increases your chances of do-overs.

Dedicated benders will yield better results than the cheap 3-in-1 tubing benders. Dedicated benders are simply tubing benders that will bend only one diameter of tubing. Virtually all of the 3-in-1s I've seen have the same bend radius for all three tubing diameters on them. As the tubing diameter gets smaller, the bend radius should also become smaller. A 3/16" line, on most 3-in-1 benders, will have the same bend radius as a 3/8" diameter line. This will produce sloppier bends than a line bent on a dedicated 3/16" tubing bender.

Some of my benders; The 3 silver benders pictured below are Imperial-Eastman brand in 3/8", 5/16" & 1/4" tubing diameters (from left to right). The black tubing bender is a Rigid brand for 3/16" diameter tubing. The manual flaring/double flaring bar and the silver tubing cutter are also Imperial brand.



This is a Mastercool hydraulic flaring set I have. It wasn't cheap but it makes production quality flares each and every time and it's WAY faster than using the manual flaring bar!



You'll need a good set of flare nut line wrenches to help reduce the chances of rounding off the flare nuts. (sorry for the poor picture quality but, you get the basic idea...)




Ford used 3/16" diameter hard line tubing (same diameter as metric 4.75mm tubing). The standard size flare nut fitting for 3/16" diameter tubing is 3/8"-24. However, Ford also used specialty sized flare nut fittings on 3/16" tubing that was 7/16"-24, 1/2"-20, 9/16"-18 and in some cases, 5/8"-18. The 3/8"-24 flare nut fittings can be bought individually from most any parts store. The 7/16"-24, 1/2"-20 & 9/16"-18 fittings generally cannot be purchased through local parts chains. You can buy them through Inline Tube though. The 7/16"-20 fitting (color code Red) is part number ST8006. The 1/2"-20 fitting (color code Black) is part number ST8007. The 9/16"-18 fitting (color code Gold) is part number ST8010.

Left to right below; 9/16"-18, 1/2"-20 & 7/16"-24 fittings on a 3/16" diameter piece of brake tubing.



It's always best to avoid using fitting adapters and use direct-connection fittings that actually fit the port they are being installed in, without adapters. Adapters just increase the potential for leaks in the brake system.

[Madman]

Great write up and pictures!

[ultraranger]

Great write up and pictures!

Thanks.

....Wish I had found this earlier. It would have saved me a lot of time trying to copy and paste photos in my previous post. The following link includes some of the same photos but primarily what I wanted to show and explain was, step-by-step, how to double flare brake lines.

http://www.fordification.com/forum/view ... es#p651561

[HIO Silver]

Yep...

[hillcountryflt]

Timely post for me.
In the process of converting from drum to discs on the front of my f100. May go ahead and replace all of the lines.
Also was thinking of using 3/8 steel line to provide the bulk of the distance from from intake manifold to the power brake booster. Just use rubber to connect to the booster.

[rhyne]

Getting ready to try my hand at it. I put on power disc brakes awhile back but haven't hooked up the lines. Hey, what's up with coiling the line right off the MC? Necessary or just looks cool?

[rhyne]

Getting ready to try my hand at it. I put on power disc brakes awhile back but haven't hooked up the lines. Hey, what's up with coiling the line right off the MC? Necessary or just looks cool?

[guhfluh]

Semi-necessary. They are there to prevent metal fatigue and breakage of the lines from movement over time.

[thejunkman]

I need to replace my crusty brake lines, but paying $200-$300 for pre-bent lines seems crazy to me.
I've been looking into making my own lines out of some steel or stainless steel tubing.
You can get 25 feet of 3/16" steel tubing for $22. Plus a few tools and stuff to cut and flare the lines.

Here's a good article: http://www.eastwood.com/brake_article

Has anyone made their own?

I notice you mentioned stainless steel tubing. Keep in mind that stainless steel is harder to work with and is not double flared like standard steel brake line. Typically a 37 degree single flare for a JIC fitting is used. Different tools will be required.

[ultraranger]

3/16" stainless steel brake tubing can be double flared (45-degree) but, the stainless tubing will have to be fully annealed, to keep the tubing from cracking/splitting at the flare, and will require high quality tools to make the double flares with.

If you have little or no experience double flaring mild steel tubing, it's probably not a good idea to start off trying to fabricate 45-degree flares on S.S. brake tubing.

37-degree single flares on stainless are easier to perform than 45-degree double flares but, 37-degree will require specialty fittings. 37 or 45-degree flares on stainless will require fabrication knowledge of what you're doing, special attention to tube prep methods and, again, quality tools to make successful, leak-free connections.

[tqwrench]

I've made my own out of steel which is difficult to work with. Last year I had a brake line fail on another car I own and after doing some research I found a product called NiCopp. It's an alloy of nickel and copper, it bends like soft copper tubing but is rated for brake pressure.

http://www.agscompany.com/automotive/br ... /nicopp/11

It took all the pain out of doing that rear brake line. As a matter of fact, it was so easy I did all the rear lines on that car. I'm never using steel tubing again.

[Fuzzyhead]

Thanks so much guys.
Awesome information.

You've definitely pointed me in the right direction.