Submitted by: TCSTD

Hard Brake Lines At Home

The How To...

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First off is to go over all the tools and materials and where I found them. You’re going to need a good tubing bender and the best one I found was this one at Eastwood. Tube Bender From Eastwood They’ve got two different sizes and you’ll probably want them both if you like the hard line look. The smaller one does brake lines and the larger one will do all your oil lines. The great thing about these tools is the fact that they have a roller follower that rolls along the tubing instead of sliding on it like most conventional benders on the market. The other types will work fine but I figured since I was buying a set, I might as well buy these.



Along with a good bender you’re going to need a good flaring tool. Now pay particular attention to this. The type of flare used on your brake lines is an AN 37° flare. While you might think that your 45° flaring kit that you can get down at AutoZone should work cause it’s only 8° difference, you’ll be sorry later down the road when you plow in to grandma’s Buick. The AN 37° flare was developed for the military where constant servicing, tear down and reassembly are required. Our friends at Motown stick with the SAE 45° flare because it works good for the semi-permanent application of production automobile manufacture, where once assembled it usually stays that way for the life of the vehicle.



I found my flaring tool after quite a bit of searching around town. You’d be surprised to find out how many people have never heard of the AN 37° flare. I chose the RIGID P.N. 41162 tool Rigid Flare Tool. It cost me about a C-note but it is definitely one fine piece of equipment. It’ll do all the sizes of tube I’ll ever be flaring and it has this neat torque limit feature that clicks at the end of the flare pulling the cone up just a tad to burnish the flare for about three more revolutions and then stops. This makes for very consistent flares for your whole system.

Next are the fittings for the connection. All of your banjo fittings come set up to use AN-3 connections. So what you’ll need are some tube nuts and sleeves for 3/16” tubing. These were a real mother to locate last minute for one of my buddy’s build projects a couple of weeks ago. But this place I found on the net has everything you could dream of for doing this type of work and for a pretty decent price. http://www.anplumbing.com Go to Section: Adapters-Stainless Steel and look for P.N.s 818-3j (3/16 tube nut) 819-3j (3/16 tube sleeve). You’ll need one of each for each connection. Also check out the other fittings they’ve got, You might find something you could use.



The final item you will need is some good quality seamless 3/16” SS tubing. You must use seamless tubing if you are going to flare it. Welded tubing is considerably cheaper but the weld seam will crack when flared thus rendering it useless. I acquired mine from Seamless Tubing - McMaster.com. (Seamless Tubing 304SS 3/16” O.D. 028” wall thickness P.N. 89895K716) It’s about $30 a six foot stick. Mcmaster ships quickly and packages the tubing very well for shipping. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to find it locally but you have to make sure they don’t slip in the welded type of tubing on ya, Seamless, Seamless, Seamless! Another thing to make sure you do is to cut the tubing properly with a cutoff wheel and not a tubing cutter. A tubing cutter will work harden the tubing right where you’re going to flare it resulting in possible cracking