I needed some new coolant lines for my gt35 so I thought I would make some out of aluminum hard line instead of doing steel braided lines again. Since I have never made hard lines I needed to buy all the tools for it.

I bought a flare tool that makes 37 degree flares for AN fittings from summit racing for $30. Every single store I went to trying to find a flaring tool only sold the 45 degree ones but it is important that you use a 37 degree flare for the AN fittings



I bought a tube cutter for from harbor freight



I bought a tube bender from advance auto that bends 4 different sized tubing



I spent about $100 on tubing and fittings. I bought 10 feet of -6 aluminum tubing , tube nuts, tube sleeves, couplers, AN to hose barb fittings, and some line mounting clamps. I also bought some -10 fittings to make a new oil drain line. Here is what I have done on the coolant lines so far



The compressor housing is rotated like that because I was only using it to test fit













I'll be bypassing the throttle body and using that source to feed the turbo and return to the engine.

 

Wow that looks factory! Good job, thanks for sharing.

 

Those aren't going to last long with being mounted to the body. Hard lines don't like a lot a movement and will break over time. Find a way to mount them to the engine. Looks like a good start otherwise.

 

I was thinking about that after I finished. the plan is to re-bend the lines coming from the turbo.

The yellow and red lines are where I would re-bend the lines too. I would mount the lines on the block with those two small bolts and make another mounting tab on the vtec solenoid.

 

Instead of routing them to the front why not go from where the oil cooler gets fed coolant to the turbo(from where ur turbo sit wouldnt be that much line)then from the turbo to the oil cooler?...i have mine setup that way except i use steel braided lines

 

Yea definitely want to attach them to the block instead of the frame. Otherwise looks, good. One of the coolest things about Aluminum hard lines is that you can paint/anodize them.

 

I thought about doing it in a similar way to that. I was going to just put it in series with the oil cooler and let coolant go through the oil cooler first then route it though my turbo and back out to the hardline from the oil cooler. On my last build I had a T fittings on the oil cooler lines and ran it to the turbo with a -6 steel braided line but it had a slight leak at my T fitting that I couldn't stop no mater what I did. The good thing about using hard line is the lines and fittings are dirt cheap compared to running steel braided line plus they stay the way you bend them

 

there are manual tube benders available that draw the tube over an inner die with a mating outer die. You get less kinks/deformation of the tube with this style of bender.

 

I'm going to buy another set of benders like that next week and redo all of my tubes, Harbor Freight was out of them when I went last time. The tubing I had got re-bent so many times they look like trash but it's my outline now. Tubing is less than a $1 per foot so I'm going to make different sets of lines with a few different options and see what I like best.





The next set of lines I'm going to make is going to run a similar path to what is shown so I can mount them to the engine somewhere.

 

Looks good