Last night, a reader and I did some high-quality wrenching on my 1954 Willys CJ-3B ahead of my wedding next month, and something happened that has ruined far, far, far too many days in my life. So here I am venting, and giving you, too, an opportunity to lament your worst wrenching annoyances.
This is something I’ve had trouble with for years, especially since I spent the better part of a decade in Michigan: Brake fittings seizing to brake lines.
If you’re unfamiliar, with what I’m talking about, you see this brake line fitting slipped over this brake line?
Its job is to squeeze that flared part of the brake line against the inverted flare in the master cylinder or wheel cylinder. Here you can see where the fitting threads in, squishing the flare you see above against the conical surface you see below:
Notice in the photo of the brake line that the fitting is separate from the line — it just slides over top. This is important, because you don’t want to twist the brake line, or it will brake. So when you tighten that fitting in the master cylinder (or wheel cylinder like the one shown directly above), the brake line doesn’t spin at all, it just gets squished against that conical surface to create a seal.
The problem is that those brake lines often will seize to the fittings, and if that happens, you aren’t able to loosen the fitting from the master cylinder or wheel cylinder without twisting, and thus shearing, the brake line. The result? You have to replace the brake line, which is a huge pain in the butt.
I’ve had various levels of success using heat and a vice grip to get the brake line to stay in place while I hold the fitting, but like last night, it doesn’t always work, meaning the small job of replacing my master cylinder just became a significantly bigger job.
D’oh!
This is among my least favorite annoyances that occur while wrenching. I also hate breaking bolts, to be clear, but at least with bolts you can heat them up cherry red, get vice grips on them, and be a bit rougher without worrying about squishing them like you do with a brake line.
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Anyway, let out your wrenching frustration in the comments!
At this point in my life, working on my back. I really don’t care what it is I’m doing, if I have to work on my back to do the job, I hate that job (now that I’m old). I’m completely over laying under a car up on jackstands at this point in my life.
Lord… the number of posts on this site related to the misery that northern climes and salt can inflict on vehicles. I am so, so, grateful to be in an area that generally does not have to worry about all of this rust related misery.
I find with seized brake fittings, it’s just easier to replace at least a section of the line. If it’s seized, it’s gonna break anyway.
Plus you can then use a 6-pt socket to get the old nuts off.
Replacement parts that come already broken. I picked up new alternator #3 for my ’74 Buick Apollo on Tuesday. The two I got from Napa were both broken. My Napa’s alternator tester is also broken. The quote from the clerk (a very nice young guy who was super helpful and apologetic about the situation) about the tester was it had been broken for, “Quite some time. I think it runs on Windows XP.”
I got the 3rd alternator from O’Rielly’s, which has a working tester. I asked them very nicely to test the new one they sold me before I took it home, and they obliged. I haven’t had time yet to install it and confirm that it works, and the anticipation is killing me!
I have been dealing with bad spark in a tractor engine. I replaced the points, condenser, cap and rotor. I messed with it for ages and then put in a second new set of points and it fired right up. Super annoying.
ARGH!
In a rented garage no matter how meticulous I was with drip pans, cardboard, plastic, towels; some leak somewhere would manage to drive itself into the concrete floor.
Electrical connectors with complex locking mechanisms that seem to always snap in just the right way that the connector becomes permanently locked together(looking at you VW) and which then require you to contort your arm into some inaccessible location to cut it off and splice a new connection on. When I had my mk4 jetta, both rear door lock connectors broke apart in such a way that they were impossible to reach and ended up preventing me from having working rear windows.
Everything that seemed so bothersome about wrenching life has shifted in my advancing age. No matter how hard or easy the job may be, the fact that my skin is so thin that most any strong sliding contact will shred skin on my arms is a huge problem. If the job offers enough room to use protection, it’s no issue. If I need to drop the engine out of my Superbeetle, and I do, the issue is huge.
You have to do any sort of service to your archaic and inefficient transmission, because it’s not a Jatco Xtronic CVT with its lifetime CVT fluid.
O2 Sensors. they almost always are near impossible to remove, even with the special wire spaced socket, and then for some reason lately even the “good” name brands seem to be bad out of the box. Also tracking down minor leaks in the fuel system only to find the gas cap was really the issue and you did not find that during the smoke test since the smoke output was replacing the cap in the system.
Just any work that was a waste of time. That comes in SO many forms when working on a car. Now that I think about it, I guess working on a deadline is the most annoying. If you didn’t need this Willys running on a certain date, this would have been a much smaller disaster.
Thinking part A is broken, breaking part B trying to get to part A, and then realizing it was really part C that was broken. all while dealing with rusted nuts and bolts stripping, cracking, or breaking the whole time. The older I get the less I enjoy working on cars.
That really is the worst, and means a bunch more trips to the parts store and taking waaaay longer than you planned. Unfortunately for me I still haven’t figured out what part C is yet on my latest wrenchscapade.
Thanks for the agreement. I watched that scenario play so often in college helping my buddies wrench I just saw it over and over and over and over again and it just turned me off of car repair for a long time.
Most annoying for me is doing a simple job and in the end 75% of my tools are out and all over the garage.
The solution to this is to buy more tools. It doesn’t change the number of tools strewn around the garage, but it changes the percentage.
Corollary to Strewn Tools Rule is the Wrong Tool Conundrum:
I try to use the wrong tool because:
I can usually get brake line fittings off. And if the lines are shot, I just saw off the line and use a 6 point socket on the fitting.
Bleeder screws are my problem.
I’ve replaced many calipers because the bleeder rounded off or broke. Sometimes I can get it bled by cracking the line fitting. But only sometimes.
Most annoying wrenching thing? Easy – the last nut/bolt on anything you need to take off.
“ This is important, because you don’t want to twist the brake line, or it will brake.”
The proofreader is on a break.
You mean brake. /s
We brake for nobody.
Channeling his inner Craigslist listing
(Looks at broken brake bleed fitting on my rusty BRAT). Nothing. Nothing has gone wrong here. Everything is fine.
(Looks at rust holes in frame). Things are progressing nicely.
(Clutch grabs right at the floor). I am very stable right now.
(Thinks about all the missing trim). I’m not crying. You’re crying.
British tractors leaking? In the end…why fight what you can’t fix?
If my Brits (Spitfire and Disco I) aren’t leaking, they are out of that fluid. It’s a feature not a bug. Every time you back out of the garage, you get an automatic fluid level check just by looking at the floor.
The problem is that a Spitfire will hardly ever be able to leave the garage, so you’ll need an alternate method of checking the fluids.
I’ve owned mine for 28 years, driven the hell out of it every summer with minimal issues. There is really no excuse for a 50yo car to be unreliable. The issues and the fixes for the issues were known many decades ago. My comment was largely tongue-in-cheek, the only thing my car leaks is small drips of oil, because Spitfires don’t actually have crankshaft seals per-se, so some amount of oil is ALWAYS coming out by design when the engine isn’t running.
My older sister bought a lightly-used Spitfire in the 80s after she moved out of the house…but it was our garage that housed it when it wasn’t running, so that was my frame of reference. Good times.
A few years prior to that, my cousin had a TR6 that he drove from New York to New Mexico, in the winter. He didn’t have any problems with it during the entire trip. But after that it refused to run properly for more than a week at a time, until he finally had to trade it. It really says something that I can’t remember what car he traded it for, but I sure remember that TR6.
In the 80s it wasn’t old enough to have been taken apart and put back together again properly.:-) LBCs of the 70s are definitely cars that were epically terrible when they were new, and much, much better 4-5 decades on..
I assume the issue with the TR6 in NM was altitude. Not something ye olde carburetors were very good at dealing with. The Strombergs probably needed a whole different set of needles compared to NY, and back in those days nobody had the first clue about these “funny foreign jobs” in the vast majority of places.
David, what exactly does No Thappy mean?
I had the same question!
Misspelling of “No Fappy.”
Which is apt considering November just started.