3B,
Thanks for the complement, but brakes are not really my thing.
I was reluctant to even mess with my own much less anybody else's. Unlike (as appear to be the majority of people on this forum) I am not trying to restore my older C50 to "show quality" condition, I just need to keep it reliably running to occasionally haul junk and backhoe around. I would have gladly bought a pre-bent brake kit, but couldn't find anything that even looked close--and the fact that I had no brakes at all (master cylinder empty after a week and pedal going completely to the floor) and what looked like mostly original 50+ year old components in poor shape, meant that this was a repair that couldn't be put off or ignored. The whole system needed to be seriously looked at and repaired/replaced. Bad hydrovac, multiple bad rubber hoses, multiple rusted/frozen wheel cylinders, rusted steel lines, every tube nut rusted in place so that they had to be destroyed to be removed, etc. So out of necessity I was forced to address these issues.
I would recommend that if anyone needs to make a tight radius bend, then they fabricate their own bender/dies. This is a project that rates about a "2" on a scale of "10" for complexity. If you are able to get the rear drums off of a medium duty truck, you have more than enough technical ability. If you have access to a lathe or know anybody that has one, the dies can be turned down in minutes--even the small hobby type lathes found on Ebay would work for this type project. Aluminum or other soft material will work fine (I was originally going to use UHMW which I think would work just as well, but didn't have a large enough diameter piece lying around).
