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Old 07-22-2021, 11:49 PM
swensond swensond is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2020
Location: Pennsylvania
Posts: 11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ol'George View Post
You can Silver solder or braze your broken line, I don't recommend it as it will prolly break again in that location, but will work for a while.
You will not double flair the line because you will be reusing your old fittings and sleeves ( unless you choose to purchase new Hyd. --parker style fittings)
the sleeve takes the place of a double flair in tubing work.
Use an old ball bat in your vice to "pull" the line around to make bends
And I mean pull with both hands, hard!!
If you try to just push the line around diameters you will kink it.
Your inexpensive bender might work, but as mentioned you will not make small factory bends without machined dies in a tubing bender machine.
The tightest bends you can make are about the radius of the big end of a ball bat or your bender.
Do buy a 60-72" length piece of brake line, as you will scrap a few of your first bends.
I guarantee your line will not have factory looking mandrel bends, but long flowing radiuses direct the fluid just as good as tight bends just not as purdy!
Do put your nut on first and then your sleeve, the flair, then try your luck at bending your tubing in that order.
You can straighten the tube back straight if you don't kink it.
A minor kink can be straightened with a hammer but not one that impedes the flow of the fluid.
When your done you will hopefully have something that will work, just not look anything remotely like factory.
When it is all said & done it will not be less expensive than factory used lines.
But you will have satisfaction and learned something.
I bent a lot of lines putting power steering on my 782 and 1650 using the ball bat as a radius.
Guess what? they work just fine.
Ol' George, I must thank you for your encouraging advice. I could not find a factory replacement tube that looked like the one on my tractor (I compared my line to the ebay link provided above as well as many I found on the sponsored sites, to no avail). I ended up spending about $90 on Amazon for a (cheap) flange tool and a roll of the 3/8" nickel-copper tubing. It only took me two hours to make a couple of test flanges and experiment with bending the tubing, and I ended up with a functional tractor.

After another 30 minutes to get the gas tank back on, I fired her up and there was no more spewing hydro fluid. As you mentioned, it definitely doesn't look factory, but it has plenty of clearance to the rag joint and the fan, and after running for about 3-4 minutes there are no apparent leaks. I'm more than happy that this is finally behind me and I can go back to using my tractor and move on to other projects. Its almost midnight here and I have a few learning points I feel might be worthwhile to share with the class (and pictures) in case anyone needs to attempt a similar fix in the future, and I'll make another post in the next few days. Again, thank you to all for the advice and encouragement.
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