I have a friend’s VW camper van coming to me this week. It requires new brakes and will probably need them all around. The problem is the brakes are stuck on. Having had a look when she went to buy it, I’ve diagnosed a seized brake master cylinder. This will mean having to crack off all the brake pipes nuts and bleed the system.
With any old vehicle, the chances of a bleed nipple snapping off are quite common, especially on the rear wheel cylinders. And the chances are that on trying to free that wheel cylinder, you are inevitably going to snap the brake pipe too.
I’ve made brake pipes before for various VW buses. They are quite simple to make. Even the one that runs front to back. But brake pipes are fiddly and time-consuming to make, bend into shape and wiggle around. What makes the job nicer is a good pipe flaring kit.
With time on my hands I ventured out and for £21 I bought a new Sealey AK505 9 piece flaring kit. It’s not rocket science what it does but you need to do it well and you only want to do it once. Badly flare the end and you have to start again. Imagine the utter annoyance of that having done all the shaping around intricate areas or worse, scrambling around underneath to make the long pipe.
What Do You Get?
In the box, you get a clamping bar that fits into your vice. This consists of a retaining bracket for the pipe. It has 7 holes for various diameter pipes. A selection of flaring ends to make the rounded ends of a brake pipe and the flare press.
The kits are quite generic and looking online you will see the same kit being sold by many makers. It just so happened that this one was labelled by Sealey, a well-known name in the garage tools market. It’s not hard to say that I was expecting good things. I couldn’t be more wrong.
To start off with, the 2 wing nut threads needed attention to work smoothly. Once this had been done using WD40 and tightening and loosening the nuts up and down over the threads of the retaining bar, I was happy to proceed.
My suitable pipe was chosen. The instructions are a bit vague in how much pipe needs to be higher than the retaining tool so it is wise to play around with it. The wider the pipe, the more pipe you need to expose.
Let’s Make Pipes
It’s not difficult or I should say it shouldn’t be THIS difficult to make a brake pipe. In total, I had 15 attempts using the same size pipe and all 15 attempts would not have been safe to use. I doubt any of the ends would have fitted nicely into the base of the various brake parts.
In practice, you need to have a piece of pipe protruding out of the retainer bar, place the suitable adaptor with its pin inside the pipe, and move the flare press over it with the point going into the dimple of the adaptor and mind down. Remove the press, and gently pull the adaptor off the pipe (I was advised to always use a suitable pipe cutter and not a hacksaw to ensure the end is nicely cut. Apparently it is not uncommon for the pin in the adaptor to snap off). In the end you should be left with a nice flared end. I can only describe what I was left with as looking like a novelty chocolate penis that had melted in the sun.
Despite not being successful at being a flaring tool, there is also one other fundamental problem I have with this kit. The retainer bar cuts jaw marks into your pipe from being clamped into it. And this is right where you want it smooth because the brake pipe nut will be going over this. Experience has shown me that with anything to do with brake pipes, you want the fitting and tightening into the caliper, cylinder, union etc to be as smooth as possible. I was not impressed with this.
Refunds Available
After several attempts, I packed it all back up and took it back to the shop for a refund. The drive back wasn’t a total waste because on the way home I bought an ice cream which was nice. A classic Magnum should you be wondering.
I would only give this 1 star and that’s only because it comes in a small handy box that’s easy to store but that’s about it. Personally I’d avoid kits like this at all costs. They simply are not worth it.
Prices range from £17.00 to £32.98 on the internet.