There are four (more or less) flaring styles in common use for brake systems. British cars have a bubble flare (aka Girling flare) backed up with a male swivel nut or a 45 degree double flare backed up with a female swivel nut. Metric cars have ISO bubble flares, where the pipes and threads are metric sizes rather than inch. Detroit iron has a 45 degree double flare backed up by a male threaded nut. Most (non-British) race cars are plumbed with AN (aka JIC) type single flares - a 37 degree single flare with a backup sleeve and inch threaded swivel nut (some people make a double flare here, which is useless overkill and may lead to failure; see below). Lastly, some brake fittings use tapered pipe fittings. Take the easy one first: tapered pipe fittings are not really a positive seal under adverse conditions. They may do the job for a street car, but they certainly have no place on a race car. The bubble flare is used with a male swivel nut, and seals at the bottom of a drilled and tapped hole, with a nice angled bottom. While it can usually be resealed, it has a limited lifetime - there's no good way to get back the deformation that was crushed out for the first seal, short of remaking the flare from scratch. Making such a flare is easy: if you are in possession of a standard 45 degree double flaring tool, the bubble flare is what results after the first half of the operation. Simply stop there, and you have the bubble flare which will seat nicely at the bottom of the hole. If you continue, inverting the form tool and finishing the job, you *then* have the more familiar double flare used by Girling and the US automotive industry. REFERENCE: http://www.dimebank.com/BrakePlumbing.html -- Shawn Feller Ohio www.carboncow.com |
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