legal for......street, strip, recycling at the s**** yard? not sure technically, but dmv will p*** ya down here, sanctioning bodies might have an issue, but not sure of either in Maple Leaf land. and tweakers down here are stealing copper from anywhere they can to recycle - u been warned! btw - i might run on my current project again...not sure
Is the point of this forum to help each other or to be an Internet tuff guy? People wouldn't be so quick to run their mouth if they were face to face. What is that comment even supposed to mean? Surf's Up Bodacious
Some of the neatest looking pieces on some of my vintage British cars have been the br*** and copper plumbing. With the right fittings (not the hardware store ****), it really looks good. I still have some bits in the junk bins; banjo fittings, Tees, etc. There's always some concern with vibration and work hardening of copper, but all those old cars had vibration loops and some terminated in braided line that absorbed vibration. Done right it looks really cool and can work well. Done with off the shelf stuff from Home Depot and it looks like ****. Lately I've been using aluminum. Easy to work, doesn't rust, and it's cheap.
Cool yer jets. You gotta have thicker skin than that on here. No point in getting ruffled over nothing. Don't know about legality, but there was an interesting post a while back that talked about using copper for oil and/or gas and how over time it would be come brittle and possibly crack. I like the look of copper and you could probably go for years without a problem, but I'd prefer aluminum or stainless myself.
I never understood the internet bully and his thought process. It was a good honest question and always count on Bruce for the correct answer.
don't go getting your virtual ******* in a bunch ratrod... looks to me like you're the one acting "tuff" at this point. use steel line with as little rubber as possible to isolate vibration. copper fatigues.
True. Even on air ride systems when copper is used and subjected to vibration there it's more likely to crack or fail. Copper is a nice looking tube though.
If you WERE to use copper line, there are a few types. What would one look for? I'm planning on copper with vibration loops and rubber where possible.
I always use copper linezz on my ratrodzzz...nothing like a good fire to touch up my patina! Rust is just too damn slow without some serious heat...
British cars do routinely use copper for brake lines; I researched that a few years back, and this is a special patent alloy with a name I can't remember. Our copper line is plain soft copper, I think, and really intended for oil furnaces and such.
Why do you traditional rod guys hate the ratrod term so much? So the younger guy's use it or it is a newer "word" to describe a rod..... At least young guys are building nice traditional style hot rods..... who gives a **** what they call it. The building of the cars is what matters, and is why we are all here talkin about it.....
Copper looks nice all polished up, but it really does get brittle over time with vibration. It work-hardens. If you pull apart an antique car that had copper fuel lines, when you barely flex the old copper lines to reach a fitting or something, the lines just crack to pieces like they were made of concrete. Copper is heavy too, so even if you put a nice curly cue in it, the weight of the extra curly cue wiggling around can still cause a lot of stress at the end where it goes into a fitting over a long period of time. If you look at old steam powered railroad engines, they might have used copper lines for gauges or something, but there's probably actually less vibration on one of those than on an engine in a car, where the engine is dancing around on rubber motor mounts. If you're not going to be driving much, you might get away with it, but otherwise you'd be better off with steel lines and short rubber hoses where necessary. I think most of the drag racing rulebooks only allow you a total of around 6" of rubber for the whole fuel line, and the rest has to be either steel or aluminum. Someone should sell copper plated steel fuel line that you could bend up and polish and not worry about.
I think it's illegal to use the words "legal" and "hotrod" in the same sentence. If it isn't illegal then it's at least an oxy*****, like "Jumbo Shrimp". If you're destined to drown, you'll never hang and probably won't burn up in a car fire I put a copper fuel line in my truck in '92, before there was anyone on the internet telling me not to.. It goes from the short rubber hose at the tank to the rubber hose at the pump and is isolated from any copper to frame contact by a few rubber insulated clamps. From the pump to the carburetor I used that other no no, aluminum. No problems to date except the "oxygenated" gas dissolved the first few kinds of rubber hose I used. Yea, I keep a getting-old extinguisher in it in case I run across some with flaming '97's with red plastic fuel line and needs some help.
Here in the rust belt we use it all the time...just NOT for brakes as domestic copper line isn't capable of holding the hydraulic pressure with a high enough margin of safety. I've used it for fuel and transmission lines...so have MANY others around here with no noticeable record of failure. You need to support it correctly of course...any line will fail if left with a long unsupported span...but that isn't rocket science. Just to put copper line potential failure into perspective...old style capillary tube gauges used it...refrigerator compressors use it...shop compressors use it as the feed line to the tank... I remember working on an early 50's Bentley that had a ch***is oiling system that oiled all the moving joints on the front end and many other parts of the car by pumping a pedal high under the dash! Tiny OLD copper line all over the place taking vibration from every direction...and nothing broken. Sometimes our fears are based more on what we expect to happen than what is proven to happen. I worry more about how people attach rubber line to metal tube than I do of just what metal is actually used in the tube! I've seen those rubber to tube joints fail multiple times...but I've never seen a noncorroded tube of any type of metal fail in any way.
the phrase rat-rod is a term most of us here use to describe a poorly built, unsafe hotrod. they're usually built as quicly and cheaply as possible,with little or no attention to detail, or asthetics. its considered a derrogetory term. it insinuates that a car was built ugly on purpose. not every flat black, or rusty hot-rod is a rat-rod. just the poorly built and copper should be fine, actually looks great polished with nice bends, and straight straights
"Funny they sell complete system replacement copper lines at macs and sac vintage ford." More resto-repro ****...original lines were all steel. And I know you can find lots of nearly unusable parts in many of the big resto houses...I have plenty of new shiny bits that don't work or fit in my ba*****t! I used to get copper pump to carb lines when that was what the parts places had and I didn't know much. Sensibly routed and supported copper may well be fine, but I've heard enough negatives to not want to experiment. Steel brake line is readily available and easy to work.
Im actually wondering where to find some cool Aluminum/copper line fittings. I was going to plumb the whole engine side with aluminum, but was weary of Home Depot compression fittings. I uses aluminum on an air ride set up about five years ago and wiht the drier set up i had the tubes never corroded and it still runs around today. Who the **** cares if someone calls something at rat rod by the way. People caal my truck a rat rod because it doesnt have any fenders and I dont cry about it. I kind of would like to learn some info on copper line and not have to sift through a bunch of complaining aout someones Internet handle. Lets build some cars, not our web based ego.
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