Ranger lost brakes, again

[kevm14]

Coming back from the transfer station with my father in law, the Ranger lost the brake pedal. Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted less than a week before the new baby, and during the weekend where I wanted to help tune his truck with the new turbo.

We looked under and several things were noticed. Well two things.

1) Right rear wheel/tire soaked. Hmm, Ed and I did the axle line and I think wheel cylinders at some point so that sucks.

2) Brake fluid dripping under the left rear shock. Both sides? Score.

Oh great, wanted to pull pics from onedrive. Onedrive cannot be found. Ian lost my 64GB microSD card for the tablet. So much for that. Pics will come later.

[kevm14]

Summary:

It was the rear hard line that goes to the rear hose, right where it goes into the hose. This is the same functional location that broke on my Caprice.

I decided to use this occasion to try copper nickel which made the job a little less miserable because I got to try a new thing. It is easy to work and flaring is easier. Add the corrosion protection and that's pretty sweet.

Ended up running about 6 feet back to where I could get to it midway up on the frame rail. It was kind of annoying to run and I couldn't even remove the old line. I would have to pull the gas tank because it runs inside the frame rail and the gas tank blocks access in a large area.

[Fast_Ed]

That copper nickel stuff is sweet. It's almost worth buying a roll. That way, you just run from the ABS unit to the rear axle. Two flares and call it a day.

Glad the wheel cylinder fix held up. I didn't want to have to break out the propane heater again for that one.

[kevm14]

I did buy a roll. Napa had it in 25' rolls. If it fails north of the patch I installed, I will just disconnect it at the flare and run that. It didn't look so easy that I could just do it all at once, so I didn't.

[kevm14]

The leak.

WP_20160409_15_29_29_Pro.jpg

I cut it where I had access. It is flared in this shot.

WP_20160409_15_29_55_Pro.jpg

[Fast_Ed]

Yeah, I get that if it's not easy to run it's probably not worth replacing too much of it. But at this point it's almost always easier to spent extra time on a job like this, than to try to carve out another opportunity to work on the car again later...

[kevm14]

The thing is...I didn't have an opportunity (I had to make one). So it will be equally as inconvenient next time. As it was we barely finished Saturday. If I added anything at all to the job, it would have been into Sunday and really cut into our turbo tuning time (unacceptable!).

[Fast_Ed]

(unacceptable!).

Agreed!!