After discovering that the front brakes were pretty close to seized up in the 2002, I ordered up a bunch of parts to refresh the front brakes, and do some mega-overdue preventative maintenance on the rear brakes.
The whole adventure is captured in this video:
The car mostly lived up to its New Mexico pedigree with most hardware coming apart pretty easily; however, I ended up making new NiCopp hard lines to go from the calipers to the strut tubes after finding one that was already damaged, and then cross threading another myself.
I tried 'upgrading' to a flaring tool that mounts in the vise, which seemed nice at first, but the knock-off Vevor tool didn't work properly out of the box. It required a couple hours fiddling with it, and the use of a drywall screwdriver bit as a shim to get a good result.
It has 37 & 45 degree dies, so the idea is that I can also use it for AN hardlines in the future. I'm hoping that 4.75mm bubble flares are its only weakness (but I doubt it). I could see potentially having Send Cut Send whip up some shims for behind the die set to dial it in; we'll see if it's worth it.
I opted for some new calipers because I can't resist fresh plating, and it wasn't much more expensive than rebuilding the original ATE calipers.
The brakes work well and the car actually rolls now, which is quite the feature.
That was just enough progress for me to feel okay getting this out on the street for a proper test drive. There is a ton of work to do on this before it is properly usable, but for now I'm just going to let my excitement override all rational thinking, and pretend this is 'nearly there.'
