The one thing I really wanted to get done this weekend was to make up the rest of the transmission cooling lines. I dropped by my local NAPA and picked up a couple more 60" pre-made lengths of 3/8" steel brake line this morning while doing my weekly food shopping.
I had previously made up these short lines coming off the trans, there's zero access to the top two fittings on the trans after it's installed.
I started out making up the lower line that will return the cooled fluid to the transmission, starting at the trans since this looked like the easier tubing route to start out with.
I continued working towards the front and made up the final connection. Bending up this first line took the better part of 2 hours, it takes a bit of time to remove and replace the line over and over along with making some minor adjustments of the bends to get things fitting just right. The steel tubing is soft enough that you can tweak it a little by hand to make minor adjustments, you certainly will end up making a lot of small adjustments before it's right.
I used all 60" of the line except for the last 1/2", I had to cut off that last little bit in order to make the last bend in the line as the flare nut would have been in the way of the tubing bender itself. After making the last bend I double flared the end. Making sure to put the flare nut on the line before making up the flare is something that's easy to forget to do sometimes!
Using some short scraps of tubing I made up a pattern to follow to get started. You can't easily manipulate the "60 long line with all of the obstacles in the way, using scraps like this helps you avoid mistakes that will scrap out the longer line you're trying to work with.
Here's the second line that brings the hot trans fluid from the converter to the coolers almost halfway finished.
Bending up the second line will go twice as fast as the first one since I now have a full-length pattern to follow. I'm just about to make the second to last bend here.
Again I had to cut off the flare to get the flare nut out of the way in order to make the the last bend and terminate this one at the trans. I cut off about 1/4" of line which puts the tubing cutter as close to the old flare as possible. The line on the top shown here is the second one I made up.
I just barely had enough tubing length to make up these lines, everything worked out well for me today. I did rethink the routing of the lines a little halfway through making up the first one and eliminated one bend near the front in order to conserve some line length, I could see that I was close to not having enough.
I still need to fasten the lines down in a couple of places using some 3/8" Adel clamps, I did my best to make them run parallel to one another. Without the fender on the car it makes little sense to fasten them down, the inner fender will move a little from where it is now with the fender installed.
Plenty of room between the lines and the header tubes, both lines can easily be removed from the topside without having to tweak them.
Finished.
Sometimes there's just no easy way out.
Doing things right is definitely worth the time and trouble, my transmission should live a long life now.
