Quote:
Originally Posted by lower50's
Looks great. Just read your build. It's funny how you set out to finish one thing and end up checking off another. Keep up the good work.
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Thanks you and Kim for the encouragement. With the wife being down for the past 10 days, I have not accomplished much. I did manage to get measurements for the brake lines so I can replace and reroute the hardlines coming from the master cylinder. I want to reroute them a bit for a cleaner look. Right now they come off the booster, dangle in midair and eventually meet up with the frame. The rear line was cut to shorten and match the frame length, but seems to want to mushroom evertime I try to double flare it. Given the 1990s Dodge brake lines are notorious for rusting through, I figured new steel lines would be an improvement.
I picked up some assorted lengths of 3/16" hard line and unions the other day. Yesterday I pulled out the tubing bender and started shaping the line from the rear axle, following the contours of the stock line. When I tried to affix it to the hose at the rear axle, I found the nuts on that piece were metric thread, and the hose fitting was SAE. I got practice anyway.
I started with another piece after confirming it had the proper nuts on the ends of the line and bent up a new piece that was the right length and followed the original tube contours, stopping just past the bottom angle of the firewall. I cut the stock line from the booster back past that, to make a shorter piece to work with when I make the new line from the booster to the firewall and down to the frame.
Just about the time I thought I would get the brake lines done, I found out the fitting for the rear wheel ABS motor is a different size. It has 3/16" line coming off it to the rear axle, but the tube nut was larger than the tube nuts on the new 3/16" line. I ended up taking the pieces to NAPA, figuring I could get an adapter for the 3/16" nut and step it up to the larger size, which I found out is for 1/4" line with SAE threads. The problem was the male end going into the ABS motor needs to have the 45* taper cup that would seat inside the ABS motor like the 3/16" double flare line. No such luck finding anything like that.
Now I am going to reuse the piece of factory line from the ABS motor with the funky Dodge fitting, reshape it with a new double flare on the bottom end and splice it to the new hardline with some 3/16" unions. Fortunately, the front hardline is pretty straight forward, just some new bends and extra length to go between the frame and firewall. No pictures of all of this yet, but some housekeeping that needs to be done.
-Joe