Title: brake lines in cabin
The Vans way to do this is to fabricate hard brake lines from the firewall down the main gear legs secured with tape to prevent chafing, then a loop around the caliper to give it the ability to flex as the caliper slides in and out on the pins, then terminate in a B nut into an elbow at the caliper. All well and good, but I elected to go with braided flex lines from TS flightlines and ordered them at the same time I got the custom lines from the pilot pedals to the parking brake valve. This will eliminate the big goofy loop of hardline at the caliper and allow me to remove the caliper without bending or having to crack the lines and then re-bleed them for a brake pad change. Got the lines off the shelf them and started looking at this, then realized I needed to make a couple of adjustments; These lines terminate at an elbow at the caliper, and there isn't enough room to screw in an elbow with the caliper installed. The flange to which the wheel pant attaches is in the way of screwing it in. Also, the steel ID tag that TS flightlines puts on these cables is about 6" from the firewall end. In my case that positioned it so that it could conceivably rub on the engine mount. Removed the calipers and installed the elbows. These are pipe threads on the caliper side, so I gooped them per industry practice (goop starting a couple of threads from the end of the fitting to keep it from getting down into the caliper) using permatex #2. I clocked them inboard slightly so that the hose will clear the caliper. Torqued the calipers on the axles to 100 "lb per Matco instructions for Nord-lock washers. The instructions that come with the wheels say that you can re-use the nord-locks as long as the shoulders aren't worn down enough to defeat the locking feature. They were seated when they came out of the box, and I've had them off twice since then, so that makes a total of 3 cycles so far. The lock feature seems to still be crisp, so I'm good with reusing them, but I suspect that I'll need to keep some of these on the shelf in the future. I also took a pair of needle nose pliers and was able to loosen the hose ID tags and move them closer to the firewall B nut so that they can't rub anything. The rest of the line is covered in clear vinyl sleeve over the braid so no worries as long as that tag can't rub on anything. It seems kind of shade tree to secure this to the gear leg with tape, but it's worked on thousands of RVs. I used silicone fusion tape and started with a full wrap around the gear leg then a couple of wraps around the hose in 5 locations. The whole thing gets covered by the gear fairings, so it just has to hold against vibration and flopping around. The starboard side routing isn't as obvious. You could make it work by going either under or over the lower engine mount tubes as it travels across the firewall over to the starboard side gear leg. I went to VAF to see what most folks do here and spent about 90 minutes clicking on build logs. I determined that routing it on forward side of the tubes seems to be the most common routing, so that's what I went with. The geometry of the routing causes it to be a little closer to the lip where the gear leg plugs into the socket on the engine mount than on the port side, so I sleeved it with a split length of vinyl tape held in place with an additional wrap of silicone tape in that area. It seems pretty unlikely that it will ever rub enough to amount to anything on either side, but unlikely isn't the same thing as impossible, so I may stand this off with a couple of adel clamps mounted butterfly style eventually. Nobody else seems to have had a problem with this, but I'm going to put it on my list of stuff to review. I have a ton of adel clamps, but somehow I don't have an appropriate size hi temp clamp for the line, so I used regular black ones to get this all installed. I'll put more high temp ones on my list of stuff to order from spruce or just pick up the next time I'm in airparts. Sharp eyes may notice in the pictures below that he screws through the adel holding this line are in backward from normal convention, i.e. screws going in the hole top to bottom so that if the nut falls off the screw will stay in the hole. There isn't much room to get a screwdriver on it if you put it in the other way, and since I'm going to have these apart to replace with the correct adel clamp I'll see if I have enough room with a stubby screwdriver to correct the orientation at that time. Torqued the lines at the calipers by snugging them finger tight then one more flat after that. They are just finger tight at the firewall because I need to be able to hold the fitting with a wrench on the cabin side to prevent it turning when I tighten these down and I can't reach that side with the upper skin checked on the airplane. I'll get that after I get the windshield trimmed and then get that skin back off the airplane.


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