Cleaning out old brake lines from sitting outside for years

[rogus]

Figured I’d share for future searches an issue my car had as it was sitting outside for 15+ years. The hood was off and water was able to get into the hard lines. Luckily the rear soft lines where toast and the hard lines along the tunnel seemed only to be clogged.

My plan for fixing this was to 1) but two new fresh lines 2) cut the ends off the lines (all 4 corners have the same size so don’t worry about keep front and rears separate). 3) use the lathe to remove the access material 4) weld up the endings for each cover to create hard line cap.


Next step is to start with the rear passenger side after replacing your brake reservoir, ls off lines, and master cylinder. After this, use a bottle and fill up with dot3 and start pumping. In my case I got lucky and was able to proceed to drivers side rear followed by passenger front and finally drivers front hard lines by rotating the 3 capped plugs with my bleeder bottle.

TLDR if you need caps use the metal ends of soft lines to make your own. It works.

[john walker's workshop]

Reminds me of old VWs that had rusty, pitted lines along the tunnel. A good hard stop and no brakes, because the line popped.

[stownsen914]

If there is any chance that water corroded the insides of the hard lines, do yourself a favor and replace them. I had hard lines pop due to corrosion (external in my case) not once but twice on my old pickup truck. Somehow it was while parking in both cases (!) but coulda been ugly ...