Bending Brake Lines

... and fitting in place

So, yet again, last few weeks turned into working on lots of little bits simultaneously.

But, finally, one of them is done - and therefore, something to log.. ahem, pardon, b-log, about :).

The brake line.

The old brake line

I needed to relocate this bad boy to free up room for the Voltage Regulator. This is the older picture - I have long bent it out of the way and cut off a chunk. It was to be relocated to run below the conduit.

Well, first, we had to locate the hole in the firewall. And that depended on the line to the reservoir, firewall forward.

After having thunk a bit about it, decided to replace the 90 degree fitting in the reservoir with the 45 degree; and the firewall bulkhead fitting with a 90 degree. That'd minimize the amount of bends and make for a neat job.

So, firewall forward we go first - that will locate the bulkhead fitting and the hole.

Mockup one

This is with old fittings in the firewall and the reservoir. The clamp on the mockup line is using an existing hole in the firewall - nice happenstance; I'd have to plug it with a "blank" bolt otherwise.

Then, "project" the tube onto the firewall, roughly mark the center, and drill!

New hole!

And now, to the most fun part. Making the tube.

This was another first - never done tubes and flares before, so first of, had to figure out how to flare them properly.

Flaring tool

Question: by how far does the tube have to stick out of it to arrive at the correct size flare?

Practice (evidence)

Answer: 0.035. For the -4 tube. :) Yeah, those practice flares are not ALL the ones I made. Just some of them.

OKay, so the next question was how to actually make it fit.

My first thought was,

Bottom hooked up, top not bent yet

• Hook up the long portion (bottom)
• Mark out the centerline of where the bend should be
• Bend

The tubing bender has alignments marks for where the marked CL should go for different angles of bends.

Marking centerline

What I didn't realize is that on this short a run, even a little error (bend being off of the ideal centerline by as little as 1/16") would cause a total misalignment.

It did, of course.

Okay, second try.

Real material!

I pulled out the roll of the new tubing, too. Partly to motivate me. Partly because I ran out of the chunk I've cut off of the old line.

This time, the idea was to bend it first and get the bend angle just right. Then, trim to correct length.

Bend angle first

Trim, flare, hook up the bottom and mark the top

This actually worked.

Question. If you have a fitting with a flared end, where to place the cut mark, so that after you cut, and deburr, and flare it, while it's sticking out of the flaring tool (un)-precisely 0.035", it fits?

Answer? I don't know. I think I got lucky :)

All done

Installed

It fits perfect. I have no idea why the fitting there looks crooked - probably weird camera angle. It's straight :).

Okay. Time for the Big Kahuna - the actual long line, running along the conduit, and under passenger's seat.

Under the seat it goes..

See that line? It goes down, turns, turns again, and again, and then goes to the center of front seat's front, and goes under.

It was rubbing against structure in a spot, too - so I wanted to clean all that up.

~30 minutes of head scratching yielded clamping arrangement that would work.

Clamps

By the way, I am stealing this arrangement shamelessly from my friend Mr. Gary Vogt of AuCountry Aviation fame. He uses similar arrangement to organize wires along motor mounts. Genius, really - and I have never seen this before (but I likely am a total idiot, anyway).

One final mock-up, and we're good to go.

Safety wire for mockup

BTW. How do you make safety wire straight? Chuck it into a drill, and spin a bit :). It'll work harden a touch, and straighten out.

Okay, now, let's do the actual new line.

Unbend a long enough piece of tubing from the roll. Pull out the old line. (and use it as a template!)

First two bends

Old line on the top, new on the bottom. I made the "tip" (that first section on the left) longer and planned to flare it later - can you guess, will that bite me or not? ;)

Getting close

Once I got to the point where the complex section (the one that goes from under the seat, to the side of the plane, and then up, and down again to run parallel to the conduit), it was time to try it on.

Maneuver it in.. it fits! Perfect! Bends clear all the right spots and fit in all the tight places.

Okay, now, time to actually attach it to the fitting under the passenger seat, hook it up with temp clamps, and do final bends and trim to final length in place.

But first, I need to flare that end - the one to go under the seat, where I left somewhat a longer stub to be trimmed later.

I trim it. Perfect length.

Crap! It does not go into my flaring tool now. It's way too short for it. WAAAY too short.

See, the flaring tool has some thickness to it. The sleeve has to fit on the tubing before you flare, and takes up another 1/4" of it's length. And, it won't go thru the bend. So there's a certain minimum length of straight tubing required for you to be able to flare it.

And, I already cut it off :( And I can't unbend it - it'll just break.

Okay, I'll admit to this. I did try to unbend it. I annealed it back to soft (torch + sharpie as temp indicator) and actually did succeed at it. But, bend flattens the tube some - and the sleeve still won't go over it.

Besides, bending this big Kahuna was actually not that hard - much easier than I thought, with old line acting as template. And, I had enough tubing. So, I decided to re-bend a new one.

Second try, I flared first. And then, I realized that Remo has probably bent his with a different kind of bender, or had a different kind of flaring tool - my bender would make that first section a bit longer than what the original line had.

Well... it wouldn't interfere with anything (I checked). It'll make it run a bit at an angle, and stick out from the seat a bit more... a bit uglier, but not a big deal (and I'll try to massage it into a bit more parallel run during final install).

First bends - the first section (with sleeve and flare) is longer than original

Oh well.

Finished bending it, and installed it into the plane.

Seat to side...

...and up the side

By the way, this is how this looks from under the plane.

From under

The "front" of the plane is on the bottom of the pic. Can you find the line? (hint - it feeds the T with hoses attached to it. Hoses go to master cylinders under rudder pedals).

OKay, so now to final bends and trimming.

Still needs to be bent and trimmed

There'll need to be two more bends - "down" to follow the conduit and "out" to hook up to the bulkhead fitting on the firewall.

That geometry would need to ensure that I have enough straight tube to successfully flare it - learned my lesson there :).

So, our little safety wire mockup to the rescue.

First bend made, marking / eyeballing the second

What I didn't realize is that this long line is much easier than a short stub. Even if you make a mistake, you can massage the line into compliance, "smudging" your mistake over the whole length - mistakes like wrong angle, a bit short here, etc.

Though, marking precisely does help. :)

All done

Two new tubes, all ready

I guess, mounting and bleeding is next; but for that, I need to replace the busted cylinder on the wheel, attempt to fix the leak in the parking brake, and re-pack the wheels (or I'll be re-bleeding the brakes later). I want to install the voltage regulator first, too, because that will minimize me messing with fasteners in the vicinity of this line.

Oh well.

PS: at the time of this writing, I am actually more than 50% thru with both of finishing up brakes, and voltage regulator. :).

Experience is a hard teacher. First comes the test, then the lesson.

Alternator Install: Nose Baffle Support Bracket

...I am Bender, insert girder

As I have thought before, I would need the new nose baffle support bracket, to replace this one:

Old baffle support bracket

...because it would have to now be shorter, fitting in front of the new case mount alternator bracket, over it's right "ear" over here:

Alternator mount ear and starter

However, prepping to set up to do it, I found this.

Gap between starter boss and alternator bracket

See that gap between the starter boss "ear" and the new alternator bracket?

Hmmm, methinks.. Maybe, maybe, I can get away without bending up a new, 0.090 steel bracket with weird geometry (it's not a simple "couple bends and you're done" - you'll see later).

Well, let's see.

Old bracket fits nicely in that gap

But it was just a touch too "low". Didn't fit right - and I couldn't raise it (that would raise the holes to which the nose baffle itself attaches, and make the whole thing just not work).

Oh well, I guess we're bending steel after all.

Around that time, my strip of 4130 I ordered from Spruce some days back showed up.

I needed a vice, and a couple more pieces of steel for bending block and such. Picked those up at big box stores (and I will admit, that included a trip to Harbor Freight..).

I also fished out my old small belt sander, and air grinder, from the storage (all my tools are packed up aside from simple hand tools - I am rebuilding my shop; and thanks God I had them close so that I didn't have to rummage thru boxes).

Cutting off a small chunk of an approx. 1/4" thick strip for a bending block is no joke...

... Cutting

My compressor would run out of air, and I'd have to stop, and, while waiting for it to get back to pressure, use hacksaw ('cause I didn't have anything better to do).

Then, I attempted to get away with shoddy bevel grind on the bending block...

Very poorly made bending block

I hoped that that little "cavity" in the middle would work enough to handle bending spring-back - the roundover was fine, just the bevel was uneven.

Ha! Bending a couple of test bends proved me wrong; and that one never gets away with shoddy workmanship.

I re-ground the block to have a nice, even section (all that on a 1x30 belt sander by the way - which I have discovered is perfectly adequate for handling steel with a ~40 grit belt).

A much better bending block

Cut my 4130 strip to width:

Hacksaw!

... and clean up that edge

Edge to be cleaned up

I kinda gave up on it, frankly - got too tired to get it straight and even; and decided to temporarily switch my mind to something else.

Instead, I cut another, test strip, of 4130, without making it to proper width - and attempted to replicate the bracket's geometry on the now much better bending block.

Thinking about how to replicate bend lines, I couldn't think of anything better than... just roughly folding a piece of paper over the old bracket.

Old bracket, test bend, paper pattern, and strip prepared for the new bracket

It worked!

The key was, rather than bending the strip over the block by hand, instead, start the bend by hand, and then finish it with the hammer. I used another piece of 1/4 strip that I cleaned up as an "interface" between the hammer and the material bent, to avoid hammer marks. This way, the bend was much tighter radius (equal to about material thickness, which is what you need for steel), and much easier to control and nudge in the proper direction.

The geometry of the bracket was close enough; the angles were off a bit, but those could be tweaked.

All that bending was one day. I felt done, and left.

Next time I was over at the hangar, I thought, "to hell with it", and decided to use my real strip that I cut out for final bracket.

Used a nice square to draw a reference line, and cleaned up and straightened that edge left over from cutting, marked the first bend line using the paper template left over from my test bend:

Bend mark one

... put it into the vice

Bend one

and bent, using the old bracket for angle reference. That worked out okay, so marked and bent the second bend

Bend two

See the problem? Yep, the first bend is not right on the mark - I did not clamp it right for that first bend. No problem though, I had enough spare length on both ends, so I just moved the location of the second bend accordingly.

Final tweaking by hand

The hole is made, the "ear" is about to be

The hole was drilled with a Unibit, and all the cutting off of small pieces was done with a 3" cutoff wheel on an air die grinder, followed by final tweaking on the 1x30 belt sander.

The ear

And now, the first try.

Did it... work!?

Wow. It might've worked!!! Maybe.. just maybe.. the final test will be if I'll be able to make the holes for the baffle in it.

But for that, we need to position the baffle, and then mark out the holes.

No problem.

Bolt on the old bracket, and hook up the baffle to it. Use anything, whatever, for reference (I used the starter conveniently sticking thru the baffle):

Reference marks set

Then, unbolt old bracket, put the new bracket in, and mark out the holes, while having the baffle back to position marked by reference marks.

Marking new bracket

Okay, here it is. The final test.

The Two Brackets

Not bad! Given the messed up geometry, me using the paper pattern, my first attempt at bending, it's not that bad at all! Hey, my holes are also not on the center; but the old bracket doesn't have it's holes particularly centered either (and it won the Golden Lindy ;) ).

I guess I'm keeping mine.

I pulled out my nice Cobalt bits I got at Oshkosh to make those holes. At that point I have obtained an old small drill press for the hangar (I had to drill the first, large, hole in the "ear" free hand - even with Unibit that was very annoying).

Sweet metal shavings

Final check

... and, trimmed to size

Emery cloth the whole thing, and it's done.

By the way - you must say - but it's just two bends! How come your holes are not lining up nicely, and such?

Well, this thing has a very messed up geometry. It's two bends, at a non-even angle. This picture probably illustrates this best:

Geometry

Meanwhile, I also had to figure out the alternator's belt length - to make sure it clears all the brackets, and holes in the nose baffle.

I wrote a bit about it in the previous post. Initially I thought that just mocking up the belt, measuring the length of the mockup, and ordering the right size would work - ha!

New belt was too long, and didn't clear the newly made bracket.

Ooookay. Well, I had the belt that's too long (the one I ordered after making the mockup of belt length with a chunk of wire). And, I had the belt that was too short (the one that came with the alternator).

So, I bought all the sizes in between.

Belts!

The one that worked? 7320 :).

... and just to make sure that everything will fit with the new bracket, I ended up putting the nosebowl back on. Didn't want to discover that the nose baffle was sticking out, or not fitting in any other way, when putting the cowling back on.

Bracket - final cut (still temp hardware)

Fit check with nosebowl

OKay. Next - the pivot arm! No bending here. Just lots and lots of grinding.

Meanwhile, all my electrical hardware started showing up! It's like Christmas in August!

Switches

Components

"Air Force one, I told you to expedite."
-ORD ATC

• Up ↑
• ← Newer
• 1
• → Older