Wednesday, September 1, 2010

McArlus Cars - 6

Next episode - brake lines

A little more forward progress with the brake lines bent up and fitted.

In all honesty I don’t think the pictures do justice to the work involved here, or indeed to how sore my fingertips were after having bent up all of the tube!

I did invest in a cheap, but very effective tube bender on ebay which made the job a lot easier than last time, and once again had the flares professionally done.

I tried hard to get the bends nice and symmetrical from side to side and to also keep the tubes nice and straight until it needed to bend, which is not nearly as easy as it sounds, especially since the tube is supplied in a coil 5m long.

Another trap to watch out for is the use of metric and imperial threads.

I am mostly using imperial largely by accident, which BGT Brakes tells me is by far the most common here even on modern (I call that up to 1990) cars, except for an hydraulic brake light switch that I deliberately chose as metric thinking that all modern cars would be metric!

I did get caught on one of the rear lines that leads from the T piece to the rear brake hose. In this instance the T piece is imperial but the standard (1980’s Laser) brake hose is metric and I mixed up the ends.

Fortunately it was a simple bend that was easily reversed.

I took the time to pre fit and clip the lines to the chassis at this stage to make life easier for final assembly on my chassis. Ken still has his chassis, cleaning up welds and organising to get it painted, so his will be clipped on later

A couple of minor things to finalise with the aluminium panels, which I will detail next and then the chassis can be painted and assembly will begin.

I CAN’T WAIT!

Regards

Simon


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