67 Butternut Build

[sjaroslo]

I took last Friday off work, and I've spent the last 3 days in the garage bending and cutting lines. I wish that there was more to show for it, but the good news is that the bending is all done! My plan all along has been to cobble together the lines I want in mild steel and then send them back to Inline Tube to be replicated in stainless with all of the correct terminations--I'm definitely closer than I've ever been. Bernie, thanks for the advice and the words of encouragement--I think that if I was doing it again I would have given more serious thought to the Cunifer approach, or even the Dorman plastic route that I know a few of you guys have taken, but for now, for my first build, for this car, I'm going with the stainless.... I don't think that I likely discovered the BEST routes or made the prettiest bends or even came up with the smartest plan, but for now, it is "good enough." I think that I need to tell myself that a little more often. I'm not planning on winning the Riddler Award any time soon, and I even have relatively thick skin if someone ends up laughing at my amateur job, I just want to get it "good enough" to be safe and moving forward and someday actually moving down the road.

So, to recap, my car has an Art Morrison front clip, DSE weld-in sub-frame connectors, and a Chris Alston Chassisworks g-link rear end with a Ford 9" in a Fab9 housing and mini-tubs. Surprisingly, I would say about 70% of the pre-fab, stock 1967 Camaro fuel and brake lines worked just fine. In fact, the brake line that runs to the rear of the car needed no alteration for the part that is under the body all of the way back; only the front part that pokes up in to the engine bay needed to be re-done (I'm also using a Wilwood proportioning valve tucked underneath the master cylinder that definitely alters the geometry). Both ends of the fuel line required extensive modification, but again, the part underneath the car needed no work whatsoever.

It looks like I'll be able to use the stock rear flex line from the body to the differential, and I think I'm even able to re-purpose the stock Camaro brake bracket that is supposed to attach to one of the bolts of the 12-bolt; because the studs on the Ford are facing the front of the car instead of the rear like on the 12-bolt, I swapped the bracket over to the passenger side (so that I could put an S-bend in the hose and take up some slack but still provide enough length to accommodate rear end motion) and ran the short length of hard line to that caliper and ran the longer, over-the-top-of-the-differential line on the driver's side.



Here's what THREE DAYS of work netted me:

Front and rear of the fuel line, front of the rear brake line, left and right rear brake lines, and the line to the "tee" that feeds the front brakes. As I said, I need to cobble the parts that I made on to the remaining portions of the pre-fab lines and send them back to replicated.

Here you can just see the mocked-up master cylinder, proportioning valve, and the line I made that runs from the proportioning valve to the front "tee" for the front brakes:


I will give myself a little credit in that the initial left and right rear brake hardlines that I made were hideous--one of them was in three different parts and the other was a pre-fab line that I started with that was a few inches too long so I ended up with some extra bends and weird shapes to take up slack. I almost did say "good enough" but thankfully I still had some more straight stock on hand, so I took the deep breath, vowed to take it slow, didn't worry too much about how I got the line to bend the way I needed it to bend (since I'm getting them done over) and just went through and re-did both lines--I'm much happier with the pieces that I ended up with....

Like I said, not much to show for three days of work!