Thread: Brake line ???'s

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Ok this Austin I got has nothing when it comes break lines... I was told that I could use the braded SS lines and run them in the tubed chassi, would this be fine for a street/strip car or should I run hard lines out side the chassi and just use flex lines for hook ups????
Thanks
Justin

Definitely hard lines everywhere except where you need some flex. Braided lines will balloon a little and make the brakes mushy - and unsafe. You shouldn't have more than a few feet of flex lines in the whole car.

Thanks im starting on it tonight so just wanted someones view on it... Do you know a good fuel line kit from fuel cell to tb???
thanks
Justin

X2. If you want to do a brake line job that will outlast the car, do the lines in stainless tubing. One thing you can do is go to your local auto parts store and buy a handful of various length regular steel brake lines and cut them up to form mockup lines. After we cut and shape those we join them together with small pieces of 3/16 vacuum line and then we can measure the exact length of the tubing we need to order in stainless.

It is a little wasteful, but it really makes it easy to duplicate the lines once the exact lengths of stainless shows up. We keep the mock up ones around until that happens, then we bend up the new ss tubing to the same shape. It saves a lot of guesswork and misfitting. We also don't like to personally flare tubing, especially ss, so we order it with the appropriate ends already done.

One of the companies we have been using is Inline Tube:

http://www.inlinetube.com/

Don

I know that some will say "it's cheating", but here's what I do to make tubing bending nicer and easier.

I save up my scrap tubing bends and pieces. Then you can use the scraps to determine where to start your bends with the tubing bender. The first bend in the tubing is "the no brainer", but the second bend, third bend, etc are much harder to get to come out at the correct length. I'm sure for the guys that bend tubing everyday it's easy. But for those of us that do this a couple of times a year the scrap bends really help avoid making mistakes. Especially if you bending stainless or chromoly you don't want to be wasting material on mistakes.

One other thing about tube bending, there "is a difference" in buying a name brand quality bender and not a Harbor Freight copy. If you ever have a chance to borrow a good bender you will never use a cheap one again.