1450 Hydraulic Line Break - Need Advice

[ol'George]

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.

[Ambush]

You can use a small diameter pulley as well. It helps support the sides and somewhat prevents flattening. Place the pulley in a vice with the tube pulled against the nut. If you can fill the tube with dry beach sand and plug the ends it will reduce the crushing. Heating a little with a propane torch helps.

Or you could check ebay for a 3/8" tube bender and do a good job. I've collected from 1/4" to 5/8' over the years for very little money.

But I agree, that a set of used tubes is the cheapest and easiest solution.

[West Valley G]

I was quite serious when I made the suggestion that a tractor shop
could make one of the lines. Now I am wondering if I had no idea what
I was talking about. It happened once before,
Is it not possible for someone to duplicate these lines? Is it a do yourself
or ebay only fix.

Ken

[ol'George]

The factory lines are made on machined dies, in a press, so the radiuses are close and tight with no kinks.
If one ever replaced brake or fuel lines on a vehicle, you know a tight close bend results in a kink.
Hand operated benders only allow for the radius to be a gentle one.
The larger the tubing diameter, the larger the radius.
If you ever looked at an exhaust system you can see marks where the mandrels were clamped to the pipe to keep it from kinking.
The mandrels keep the pipe from kinking while bending.
Of course an exhaust system works more efficient with long flowing bends.

If there is enough room for the first flowing bend to clear the fan ,prolly one can make the next one along the frame, towards the front.
When I made lines for my power steering conversion, I retained the factory lines from/to the hydro, but custom bent lines to the spool valve, steering cyl and steering unit.
One can make some awful pretty lines/bends using a hand bender, but one has to allow room for the bends as they are not going to be tight radiuses like bends made in a die.
Hope this explains things.

[Billy-O]

If you want to get a tight radius possible, maybe you can invest in an nice Swagelok bender which can get down to 15/16" radius:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Swagelok-3-...-127632-2357-0

[finsruskw]

Is your 1450 a dual stick or single?
You need to look for the correct replacement line for your application, whichever it is.
Specify dual spool of single spool.
They are out there I'm sure.

[West Valley G]

What an enlightening thread all the way around, sorry Swendson that
it is at your expense. Hope you get it sorted out for sure.
George, thanks for the concise walk through the process.
Somebody out there has to be making similar parts, brake shop?

Ken

[ol'George]

These people make custom brake lines for most everything and they are quality.
They prolly could duplicate cub hyd lines, at a cost that would be reasonable but not inexpensive as it is a custom thing.
I have used a set of their Stainless lines on a '90 chevy suburban some years back.
Fit and finish were perfect, sorry I don't remember the price.
if you want you can read their WWW. FAQ's
https://www.inlinetube.com/
Sorry it is sort of off track, but totally related.

[swensond]

Originally Posted by ol'George

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.

[swensond]

Originally Posted by finsruskw

Is your 1450 a dual stick or single?
You need to look for the correct replacement line for your application, whichever it is.
Specify dual spool of single spool.
They are out there I'm sure.

This turned out to be key. I have a dual spool model, and ALL the replacement tubes I found were for single spool models. See the picture below of my original line. I'm sure there might be some used ones somewhere, but I didn't find them after 1-2hrs searching.

The biggest problem I had with my fix was finding an affordable flaring tool for 37 degree flares - there are gobs of cheap Chinese tools under $30 for making 45s, but I ended up spending almost $60 on the cheapest 37 degree tool Amazon had to offer. See photos, it worked fine despite plenty of reviews that said it was crap. It turns out if you go slow and be careful this is a pretty hard thing to screw up.

Nickel copper is pretty easy to bend, even just by hand. I also used some wood blocks in my vice and just worked the line around slowly until I had roughly the "S" shape I needed. I did end up scrapping my first tries because I ended up needing much less length than the original.

I made a couple of test flares on the scraps until I was confident that my flares looked close to the originals. Next I put on the fittings, flared both ends, and connected the first end to the spool. I was then able to bend the line in place until I got it to where I could connect the other end to the pump. Then I just had to bend it a little more to get clearance to the fan and rag joint.

All in all, this was way easier than I expected. If you ever need to replace a line like this and it doesn't need to look pretty, I highly recommend this option.

Again, thanks to all and good luck with your own projects.