The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Driveline Straightening metal brake/ fuel line

Stumbled upon this whilst working on a project a few months ago. This guy’s method (I’d describe it as “shocking” the line) works surprisingly well.

How to Straighten Brake Line TUBING with (Common Hand Tools)

I’d say it works very well with 3/16 brake line and plenty good enough when you get up to 5/16+. Have to kind of calibrate how hard you whack the vise grip depending on diameter of the tubing.

I still prefer to buy the straight sticks pre-flared when possible, but sometimes a run is long enough you can’t get those.

Pretty neat trick. I 3d printed a five roller straightener that mimics the vender bought type. I also printed additional wheels for different size tubing. It works great.

I'm using all stainless lines. I went all in and bought the nice straightening, bending, and flaring tools. The pricey straightener works very well but I have no experience with other ways. It's not a complicated tool and it makes me wonder why they cost so much. I have nitrous, fuel, and complete brake lines to do. I've completed the nitrous/fuel hard lines. For about $1k you can put a complete fire system in the cab and engine compartment so on a performance build why not? I have a 16 jet nitrous fogger plate on my Weiand 6-71 for my 292. To buy 16 short strait sections of 3/16" nitrous line with an A/N flair on 1 end was going to be $240. If I remember correctly I bought in the roll 30' for $40. 30' would have done it but this being my first time I messed up a couple and had to buy another roll. It won't go to waste. It's not as hard as it looks. I'm just an old carpenter and I pulled it off. I think it came out pretty good. I made the mount for the distribution block, mounted it and the drew out on a piece of paper actual size of the lines. I made one bend at a time and layed the line on the drawing and marked the next bend. My drawing had 90 degree lines on it and I just measured back the radius of my bender and started the bend there. No fancy math. That kind of recalibrated anything I was off on the previous bend. I started with the easy ones and had some practice by the time I got to the hard ones. Around the throttle linkage is where I made my mistakes. I guess my point is this is well worth doing and doable. A quick trip to the buffer shined them up.

Interesting trick, but he buggers up both ends of the tubing in the process. I just bought one of these and was done straightening by the time he had his tubing out of the package.
Straightening is the easy part, but bending to the right shape is quite a bit harder.
Mick, that's some purdy tubing bending right there.

What is DB? Did it come from an Aston Martin?

Dean Blowers. That's who I got it from. Rick Dean. It's a classic Weiand case with new internals.

Moving this thread to the Driveline as the topic seems to be mostly on the working/fabricating of brake lines and the associated tools.

Depending on how the conversation continues, it could end up in the Tool Chest.

I needed straight line to run new brake lines on a school bus at work. We had a piece of channel iron 4" wide and a handful of idler pulley bearings. I laid out 4 bearings on one side, 3 on the other spaced between the four so the tubing snakes its way through them. On each end we had one vertical to hold the tubing down. I used 3/8" nuts, bolts, and washers to give me room to adjust each bearing, the holes in the bearings were 1/2" or slightly bigger. One guy feed the line in while unrolling the coil, another pulled it through. A couple of passes through and we had a straight 50 foot piece of 1/4" brake line ready to use. It works like the hand held versions only ours was vise mounted and cost nothing to build with what we had laying around. The more bearings or rollers you have, the better it works.

I’d love to have a proper straightening tool, but don’t do this enough to justify. The “shock” method does produce a better result that trying to straighten by hand or on the floor. That tends to just add small bends in more places.

It ain’t perfect, but a definite improvement over other things I’ve tried.