Mark Simpson

Bending Brake Lines and Creating Inverted Flares on Brake Tubing

Mark Simpson
Duration:   6  mins

Description

Cutting, bending, and creating inverted flares on brake lines is a necessary skill when building a classic car. Mark Simpson takes us through the process step by step so you’ll be prepared to build your own custom brake lines.

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4 Responses to “Bending Brake Lines and Creating Inverted Flares on Brake Tubing”

  1. Leon Ahronian

    excellent demonstration. I will try next

  2. George Castañeda

    Would like to see

  3. Larry Dubis

    Good info. Would have liked to see additional comment on measuring tubing prior to bendin g to ensure your bend ends up where it is intended to be. i.e. if a 2 inch straight section is required before a 90 degree bend, how do you set up bender to ensure it forms tubing at right location to meet the 2 inch requirement. Thanks - Larry

  4. Chuck Holmes

    Pocket knives, utility knives all are good for deburring. But if you look at the tubing/pipe cutter, most have a blade that will swing out like the blade on a pocket knife which will probably be much safer to use vs. a knife.

"" When replacing brake lines on cars, eventually you're going to have to bend and cut them to size. Well, the auto parts stores has them in varying lengths. When you get down to it, there you're going to have to actually fit it to the car itself. Vendors, I've tried a lot of different vendors over the years. This is the style that I prefer but there's others available. And it's a very simple process to actually use the bender. The line goes in and it's merely pressing the levers to form the bend to whatever degree you need. After your bends are made, you wanna next cut this to whatever length that you would need it. In this case, just for example now let's say this is how long we need it. Simple process you use a tubing cutter and you align that there's a cutting wheel on the cutter itself. You align that with your mark and simply turn it and then tighten it a little turn it some more until the tubing finally comes free. Now that the tubing's cut the wheel actually pushes in the sidewalk the material from the tubing. And I use a, just generally a pocket knife to remove the bar that's created from the cutting process, and once I've completed that, I generally run the file over just the sharp edge, just to knock down the edge before creating an inverted flare. Next always remember to put your fitting nut and before you create the inverted flare. Don't me how I know that"". Moving next. Well, we'll take this line into our flaring block and they're labeled for the size of the line. In this case, we're using three sixteenths line and we've selected the three 16th hole and inverted flaring kit. Kit includes these dyes to actually complete the flaring. The first step of the flaring is to decide how much of this tubing needs to stick out from the block. And in this case, you want to adjust it so that the tubing sticks out as much as the the step on the dye itself. Once we have that in at the right height to tighten up the clamp, set the dye in there, then tighten that up. Can you just need to get it till it kind of bottoms out. No sense here, you don't need to do torque on it a lot just till the it kind of reaches that point where it doesn't want to move down further. Now remove the dye. And what it's done is it sort of created bubbled shape and now will push that down into full flare fitting. And again, you don't have to force this at all. It shouldn't require a lot of force, and there you have it. That completes an inverted flare. You're ready to go make brake lines for your project now.
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