How To Bend Double Flare Brake Fuel Lines

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In this video, we're going to show you how to cut, bend and apply a double flare to a brake line. Why would you want to do this? If you've got rusted out or leaking brake lines or clutch lines, then it's a good idea to replace them, and it's often cheaper to do it on your own than it is to buy pref from the manufacturer ones. What we're going to do is walk through the tools that you're going to need and the materials that you'll need. Let's get started.

All right, so the tools that we'll need are a tubing bender, you probably get away with not using a tubing bender if you don't have very tight turns, but it's always a good idea to do it, you don't want to crimp the inside or bend it too severely where you obstruct the flow of the brake fluid. You'll need this, you'll need a tubing cutter, and you'll need the double flare kit.

The materials that you'll need are your ends, and you'll have to predetermine what they are, what size, and what thread type, and, of course, a roll of brake line.

All right, so here's the line that we're going to duplicate. It's got a couple of different bends in it. This line is good shape, but we're going to go ahead and show you how to replace it. This is say, for instance, the one that you needed, so I'm going to measure up two inches so that I know is here. Measure over and that is roughly three inches, and then we've got five and roughly two. We've got to record those, and let's go ahead and make this line. All right, so all the figures add up to one foot, so you've got 12 inches. I'm going to add a little bit more because I can always trim that later. I'm going to go roughly 14 inches, just as long as I have enough. Good. I'm going to put the pipe cutter on, and I'm going to tighten this down just a little bit. You can see from the side. Make sure that it's in between the two wheels, tighten it, rotate it around until it feels loose, tighten it again until it feels like it's loosening up, and continue doing that until you cut your piece off. Now you can clean out ends.

Now I'm going to follow my pad here, mark my two inches, the next one is going to be at five inches, the next one is going to be at three and two. Those are going to correspond with my bends. All right, so here's my tubing bender and there's three different diameters with grooves, and I'm going to match it up with the one that corresponds with yours. Then there's my mark, at two inches, I'm going to match that up at zero and let it rest against here. These marks on the bender correspond with the degree that you are going to bend it. Once you know that you've got it marked, hold it steady, and give it a bend to 90. I've got my next bend lined up which is coming up this way, there's my five inch mark, at the zeros. I'm going to hold it steady and you can see that I'm bending it in the opposite direction to 90. Now I'm going to go ahead and bend the last two.

Got the tubing cutter set up, ready to go to cut off my excess. I'm going to clean up the end that I just cut. Now, before we move onto the flaring process, you want to make sure that you put your ends on so that you've got the threaded portion towards where we're going to flare. Now, onto the flaring tool. This is how this works, we have 3/16 tubing, so everything that we're going to use is going to be the 3/16 size. Now this is a flaring bar, flaring tool and this is our adapter. Your set will probably come with a bunch of different ones, you notice that this one is marked at 3/16, fits in there nicely, so that's the one that we're going to use.

Now, to begin, we're going to have our end in here, of course, I'm going to go to the 3/16 size. Our adapter has this ridge on it. We're going to put it like this, and that's how much of the tubing is going to be revealed. Once you have that set, tighten down on your flaring bar, make sure it's good and tight. Now you're going to insert your adapter this way and then install your flaring tool like so. Take the bar and go ahead and crank down on it. Once you've got it all the way down like this, you can unscrew everything, take it out, and remove your adapter.

You're going to want to leave this back in here. Now so that's a single flare, now we're going to double flare with just this going right into the hole. Insert your bar and crank back down on it. Remove it and unscrew. There you have your double flare.

All right, now we'll go ahead and do the other end. All right, so we've got our tube bent, fittings installed and double flares put on. You can see it matches up with the original and it's ready to be installed.

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