The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Driveline Brake hose copper washer?

Do I need a copper washer between my brake hoses and cylinders? I don’t see how the hoses will have an adequate seal.

With straight threads you definitely need a copper washer. Your FLAPS should have an assortment to choose from. Take your hose with you to get the correct size.

Thanks Kevin. No wonder I had to frequently add fluid and bleed the brakes.

Also, use a new copper washer every time the line is removed and reinstalled. The soft copper gets several lines engraved in it from concentric circles on the mating flange of the hose, and it's virtually impossible to engage the same grooves twice. Re-using a washer usually ends up with a seep leak and then a stripped thread or a broken fitting while trying to stop the leak by tightening it repeatedly.
Jerry

Jerry, you are right on, but back in the day when I didn't even have two copper pennies I have "sanded" them down some and "had" to reuse them. The good Lord was my pilot many times in my life!!!!

The way to reuse copper washers (if you can't afford to replace them) is to anneal them by heating them red hot and letting them cool. Copper is one of the materials that will work harden. I've had to do that once in a pinch.

I've resurfaced more than a few of those washers myself, and had the missing fingerprints for a while to prove it. Getting enough of a grip on that little washer to scuff it across a piece of sandpaper on a sheet of glass is quite a challenge!
Jerry

Kevin, when I was doing industrial maintenance we used to work harden copper tubing on purpose. A 50 foot coil of tubing unrolled and stretched a few inches with a pair of vise grips and a come-along gets nice and straight and holds its shape better when using a tubing bender. We did a lot of modification of pneumatic controls of obsolete tire curing machinery when I worked as a maintenance technician in a tire manufacturing plant. We were converting bias ply tire machinery manufactured in the 1940's and 50's to cure radial tires.
Jerry

Jerry, being someone who reloads, have you annealed the necks of the brass cartridge cases?
I've had a few cracked necks before I started annealing them after a certain number of reloads. Both the act of firing each round and then resizing the neck work hardens the brass pretty quickly. Standing the cases in a pan of water to just below the neck and using a propane torch does the trick before running them into the resizer die.

For several years my wife and I were moderators on a hunting/shooting/outdoor website called Modernsportsman.com. It's pretty much history now, since the owner of the site passed away. There's been as many billions of electrons wasted on discussing brass annealing there as we do on the subject of Rochester vs. Carter carburetors! Some reloaders swear by the procedure, while others swear at it. One guy who is probably a "train driver" in his daily life even cobbled up an automated process using two torches, a stepper motor, a rotating shell holder, and a timer. He claimed that manually heating cases with a single torch resulted in uneven heating of the case neck and inconsistent annealing results. Another guy who claimed he could load 1K rounds a day on a single stage press to support his participation in some sort of target competition he did claimed that annealing was unnecessary and shortened case life. Those guys reminded me of some of the off the wall stuff I see posted on Stovebolt.

When I'm doing some pretty radical case reforming for a wildcat cartridge like necking up .204 Ruger cases to .25 caliber for the ".257 Scooter" round I was involved in developing, I anneal brand new brass to reduce the neck-splitting problems we encountered while case forming. Other than that, I really don't see the advantage of annealing unless one is loading a round where new or once-fired brass is hard to find like the .43 Egyptian Mauser I load for. Bertram Brass in Australia makes a limited run of them occasionally, at around $5.00 a case. Shoot and reload until the neck splits, then grab another piece of brass out of the bucket. I've got couple of thousand once fired 7.62 NATO cases, and almost that many .30-06 and .270 cases stashed away. With those basic rounds for case forming, I can make practically every other case I shoot.

I once had a bunch of .30-06 match ammo loaded by the Lake City armory for military target competitions. They had the characteristic rainbow-colored case necks, indicating the brass had been annealed during manufacture, apparently to assure the proper neck tension on the bullet. LC Match brass is almost impossible to find these days. It's good stuff!
Jerry