Why do I never learn my lesson about being an impatient cheapskate, and instead wind up having to fix things three times? Last week, when I said that I would begin my new 26-part series “Why Do I Never Learn Lessons About Being An Impatient Cheapskate And Instead Wind Up Having To Fix Things Three Times,” you probably thought I was kidding. Well, perhaps exaggerating; 26 parts is probably too fine a grain. I think I can knock the gist of it off in one column.
Maybe two.
In his interesting and useful book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey observes that most things are created twice. The first creation is usually mental: designing a house, planning a vacation. The second creation is physical: building the actual house, taking the actual vacation. His big-picture advice is this: While doing the first creation, visualize the second. In other words, begin with the end in mind.
For better or worse, I routinely violate this precept. And it really has less to do with being cheap—Lord knows there are areas where I’ll spend money like running water—and more to do with the fact that I am not a big-picture guy, and instead tend to think and work incrementally. Let’s take the recent example of doing the brakes in my ’79 Euro 635CSi with 220,000 miles on it. You may recall that while the car was over-wintering on the lift in my garage, I changed all the fluids, and when I bled the brakes, I found that nothing came out the right rear bleed nipple. Usually, when this happens, it’s because the original rubber brake hose at that wheel has swollen up and plugged itself. The smart thing would’ve been to, right then and there, while it was still winter and the car was already up on the lift, change all the rubber brake hoses. I’ve done this on many cars. Often, a set of six aftermarket braided stainless-steel lines is more cost-effective than buying OEM rdbber.
But Did I do that? Noooooooo.
In my defense, when I buy a needy, high-mileage car—which is to say, when I buy a car—I want to suss it out. I want to get a gestalt as to what the car is, and what it needs in all areas, before I commit to dumping uncontrolled sums of money and unbounded stretches of time into it in any specific area.
I had driven the Shark briefly before I’d bought it, and I didn’t recall it obviously needing brake work. Now, there were other obvious things it needed, replacement of the leaking gas tank pre-eminent among them. So what I was doing over the winter was preparing the car to be driven so I could better grok its gestalt. (I think my Real Automotive Writer special-access card is automatically revoked for using that phrase.)
When the snow finally melted and I began driving the Shark, it took about a hundred miles before I noticed that, in fact, the brakes felt a bit vague and spongy. I checked the pads and found them nearly new, and the rotors looked fine. It was only then that the light bulb went off about the unresolved issue of the rubber brake hoses. They may have been the cause of sponginess in two ways; first, the fact that I couldn’t bleed the right rear cylinder meant that it was possible, though unlikely, that there was a little air trapped in that line. Second, as rubber brake lines age, it’s possible for them to balloon slightly when you mash the pedal, so instead of all that pedal action going to squeeze the calipers, some of it goes into slightly expanding the rubber, making the pedal soft. I looked at all the rubber brake hoses closely, and found that they were original and in terrible condition after 220,000 miles.
Okay, well, obviously, I was foolish not to have done this over the winter, but let’s do it now.
I found a set of aftermarket braided stainless brake hoses for about sixty bucks for the set on eBay from a Canadian supplier. I put the Shark back up on the lift, and, while I was waiting for the new hoses to arrive, I began removing the old rubber ones.
Now, replacing rubber brake hoses is usually not that big of a deal: The end of the rubber line has 14-mm hex sides you can get a wrench around. The end of the metal line is 11 mm. As I mentioned recently when talking about the Turkey, you use flare-nut wrenches on brake lines and hoses. They’re basically box-end wrenches with a slot cut in them to slide around the line or hose, allowing you to get a wrench surface on five of the six sides on the nut, reducing the possibility of rounding the corners off the nut. You orient the wrenches, with one on the hose and the other on the captured fastener on metal line, so that when you squeeze them together with your hand, it loosens the captured fastener on the metal line. And you pay close attention to whether the metal fastener is in fact free to rotate, or is stuck on the metal line.
I started with the outer connection of the right rear line, soaked it in Silikroil, positioned my wrenches, and squeezed. They would not budge. I squeezed harder—until it my hand hurt. Nothing.
I repositioned the 14-mm wrench on the rubber line so it was braced against the body of the car—so I wouldn’t need to hold it—and pulled on the 11-mm wrench with both hands, careful to keep it square with the nut, until my arms hurt. But even using flare-nut wrenches, I rounded the corners of the nut on the metal line.
Damn.
Okay, let’s try our luck on the inner connection of the right rear hose. I could see it from the right side of the car, but I couldn’t get a wrench on it. I crawled beneath the car, and found that the differential was directly in the way. There was one sliver of access, like Stonehenge at exactly the right time of the year, but I couldn’t for the life of me get wrenches on the joint in a way that felt secure.
I moved to the left rear; there, at least, there was gobs of access. I carefully positioned the two flare-nut wrenches, making sure they were securely on their nuts. But when I tried breaking the connection loose, same thing: they wouldn’t budge. And when I cranked up the torque until my arms hurt, even using flare-nut wrenches, I rounded the nut on the metal line.
Well, this isn’t going well.
I have been a recent (well, past six or seven years) convert to the use of heat to free stuck fasteners. I have an oxyacetylene torch that’ll get things hot enough to melt them, but it also shoots out a damned scary tongue of flame, making it tough to use safely in areas with impeded access. I use it routinely on stuck exhaust fasteners, things like headpipe nuts, but I’ve never had to heat up brake-line parts before. The oxyacetylene torch seemed like overkill, so instead I used my small MAPP-gas torch. By soaking the joint in Silikroil, heating it red hot, giving it another blast of Silikroil to draw the penetrating oil into the hot threads, and grabbing the now-rounded 11-mm nut with a pair of Vise Grips, I was able to break the joint free. I went back to the outer right side and did the same on the joint I’d rounded there. I continued to pass on the inner right side, as I still couldn’t figure out how to reach it.
I worked my way around to the front of the car, using heat pre-emptively. It worked like a charm. By heating each joint first, I was able to get the rest of the hoses and lines disconnected without rounding any more nuts. But even with heat, with each one I did the “Oh, my word, this thing is tight—little more, little more, it’s turning, is it rounding? No? We good? Yes!” thing.
With five of the six lines off, I could no longer avoid dealing with the wretched, evil inside-right-rear connection. I must’ve looked at the damn thing for 45 minutes, laying on my back, trying to get wrenches up from the bottom, then moving to the right side. The car has a side-loader differential with a thing on the right side of it that appears to be either some component of a fluid-cooling and venting system or a piece of a whsky distillery (I admit that I do not in fact know what it is or what it does) that is directly in the way of the right-inside-brake- hose connection. I tried to take it off, but its connections were frozen.
I posted to bigcoupe.com for advice, but no one else seemed to have experienced this particular problem. I asked my DIY and pro friends on Facebook, and one pro said, “Yeah, it’s a bear, but you can sometimes get enough clearance by simply loosening the rear differential mount, letting the diff hang down a bit, and reaching above it.” I tried that, and while it was helpful in getting a wrench on the joint, the wrench felt wobbly. And it was nowhere near enough clearance to get the MAPP-gas torch on it, as was necessary for every other fitting.
Sometimes you spend more time trying not to do the thing you don’t want to do than it would take to actually do it. Pulling a diff isn’t that bad. It’s contained. There’s no wires or plumbing, just mechanical attachment. It basically drops straight down. The worst part is usually undoing the twelve 8-mm Allen bolts holding on the half-axles; if you strip these, you’re boned. But air tools make relatively short work of them, as long as you don’t strip them using the air tool, in which case you’re simply boned more quickly. Clean each Allen bolt hole out with a small screwdriver or other pointy probe, insert the Allen driver into the hole, tap it with a hammer to seat it, put the impact wrench on it, squeeze, whacketa-whacketa-WHEEEEE, lather, rinse, repeat. They all came out without a hitch. All that was left was to disconnect the differential itself from the carrier.
What a pain: 220,000 miles of grime. I couldn’t even find all the bolt heads without scraping inches of mung off the top, only to find that there wasn’t enough clearance on the top to fit a ratchet socket, much less an impact wrench. I had to use a box-end wrench with a pipe on the end. And one of the nuts was blocked by the whisky-distillery thingie, making me have to do the 1/16-of-a-turn-then-reposition-the-wrench bit.
With all of the nuts loose, I could position the floor jack beneath the differential and lower it out of the way.
I had finally fully exposed the inner side of the recalcitrant brake hose, and now I could see the problem: The inner nut was already rounded off. That’s why the flare nut wrench felt loose. Someone had already tried to get this bad boy off, rounded it, and elected to back slowly out of the cave rather than battle the beast to its death.
But now I had gobs of room. Silikroil, MAPP-gas torch, a folded-up aluminum pie plate to shield the undercoating from getting burned completely off, Vise Grips on the rounded nut, and off it came. Finally.
Now, this metal brake line came out of the T-fitting that splits out to both rear wheels. If the right-inner-brake-hose joint is difficult to access with the differential in the car, the ends going into the T are simply impossible, as they live directly above the differential. I looked at the T and the three lines connecting to it. All were corroded—not leaking, but non-trivial surface corrosion, what a friend of mine calls “coffee cake.” The metal fuel lines looked the same way. Well, what metal fastener beneath a 220,000 mile car isn’t corroded? After owning 55 BMWs, most of them with between 150,000 and 200,000 miles on them, I’ve never had a metal brake or fuel line burst. (Whereas, on my 2000 Suburban, I’ve popped three metal brake lines. Don’t get me started.) I was perfectly content to put in the new braided stainless hoses and call it a day.
But, you ask, what about the rounded nuts on the metal lines? Well, there’s rounded and there’s rounded. Yes, I’d rounded several during attempts to loosen them, but there was still enough of the hex sides for a wrench to bite on to tighten them. If necessary, I thought, I could simply hold them in place with Vise Grips, and tighten down on the nut on the side of the new stainless hose. I had not signed up for metal brake-line replacement, and I was not going to let this project mission-creep its way into it unless it was absolutely necessary. I don’t really like bending brake lines; I make the first bend, then lose patience, and the rest of it looks like a whisky still—in which case it would look right at home with that thing on the right side of the differential.
And then, while cleaning the threads at the end of the right metal brake line, I had to bend it slightly to move it out of the way of something blocking it in order to get a rag on the threads, and I felt it bend in a way that I didn’t like. It may have been my imagination, but rather than feeling it bend in a graceful arc, I thought I felt it crease at the connection at the fastener going into the T. I looked at the T-fitting that would be completely inaccessible with the differential reinstalled, and imagined how stupid I’d feel if I put the whole thing together only to have it leak there because of this crease. So I put heat on that connection, too, removed the metal line, ran down to the parts store, bought a short length of metal line (as I did two weeks ago with the Turkey), bent it up (this one’s easy; it’s just an S, and it’s somewhere no one will ever see it), and installed it. The whole thing took perhaps an hour.
It was a joy to finally install the new braided stainless brake hoses. The rounded nuts on a few of the metal lines proved to be no impediment. I’m not sure that I can call reinstalling the differential a “joy.” By the end of the evening, my 56-year-old body felt like it had lost a fight with a giant squid. But it was done.
When I drove the car, the brakes felt… slightly better. It’s not like they were awful before, and it’s not like they now felt ready to detach my retinas. It was a ton of work for modest gain. But it did need to be done. And no, I have no plans to methodically replace every metal brake and fuel line on the car that shows surface corrosion.
I thought about the whole Stephen Covey “Things are created twice, begin with the end in mind” thing. Maybe I just do it a different way. Maybe the end I have in mind is simply “Own and drive the cars that bring an insane smile to my face, and maintain them in a way I can afford.”
I can live with that.—Rob Siegel
