When you read this, Kugel, my ’72 2002tii, and I will have just returned from a nearly-2,000-mile jaunt to the Vintage in its new home in Asheville, North Carolina. I’ll soon have a piece in Roundel Magazine about it.

    The on-ramp to the trip began with my taking Kugel out of winter storage about a week before leaving, and giving him a short 150-mile shakedown to a BMW CCA cars-and-coffee meet in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

    Pretty much everything ran right (and the air conditioning was blissfully cold), so I thought that the car and I would have an easy launch to the Vintage. I saw many posts on the Facebook Vintage page of all these folks frantically trying to ready their cars. and thought, ah, the poor saps. No discipline. Bad timing. Biting off more than they can chew. Amateurs. Age brings wisdom. I’d never do that.

    Never mind the fact that two years ago I finished rebuilding Kugel’s engine two days before leaving for the 3,100-mile round trip to MidAmerica 02Fest. Because age also brings forgetfulness. I’m sorry; what were we talking about?

    I did notice one thing on the shakedown cruise: The brake pedal seemed to travel through a zone of inaction before it got to the stopping part. Probably misadjusted rear shoes, I thought. No harm in looking at it, right?

    Now, Otto the 2002 was still occupying prime real estate in the garage—the midrise lift—so I pulled Kugel in butt-end first and jacked up the back end. The rear brake adjusters were stuck, as they always are. I have a very effective technique of freeing them, involving pulling off the drums and shoes, heating the inside ends of the adjusters cherry red with a torch, applying wax to the rotating joints, and putting a stud extractor on the shafts to get them to turn. But when I tried to go down this path with Kugel, I couldn’t get the first drum off; it was stuck solid. I tried heat and wax on the hub, but the puller still wouldn’t pop it off.

    There are times when I’ll put the air impact wrench on the puller and just yank for all its worth, but it was early Sunday morning, and decorum dictates not running the air tools till 10:00 a.m. So I stopped, and instead heated and waxed the adjuster nuts on the back. It took a few tries, but I freed them, adjusted the shoes, and took Kugel for a drive.

    It made no difference.

    Well, I thought, the next likely cause was swelled rubber brake lines. Like most vintage cars, 2002s have six rubber brake lines (two at each front caliper and one at each rear drum) that flex as the suspension travels up and down. With age, the rubber inside the lines degrades and clogs up the fluid passage through the lines, making brake action sluggish. Eventually they plug up entirely.

    For many years, the trick thing to do has been to replace these rubber brake hoses with braided stainless lines. In fact, I had a set of braided stainless lines in the garage; I won them two years ago at MidAmerica 02Fest. There had been a few occasions when I needed to replace the rubber lines in other 2002s and almost reached for these, but I always thought, no, these belong in Kugel. They’re his. He won them fair and square. It’s one of those circle-of-life things. Now was my chance to fulfill that commitment.

    The problem is, of course, that things go wrong all the time when you’re doing brake work. It’s easy to start a job and wind up with a hobbled car. The metal brake lines in a 44-year-old car can be fragile. Even if they don’t show the classic coffee-cake-like rust on the outside, the fittings on the ends, which are supposed to rotate freely on their captured flares, can grab and cause the metal lines to twist right off when you put a wrench on them. Although I now keep a length of copper tubing, a flaring tool, and fittings in the garage, it would still drag my Sunday afternoon to a screeching halt if I snapped a metal brake line.

    So I thought I would just do it very carefully.

    The metal fitting on the rubber line takes a 14-mm wrench, so you need to put an open-end or a slotted flare-nut wrench on it, as well as an 11-mm wrench on the metal line. When I replaced the Shark’s rubber lines, I learned the trick of prophylactically heating the metal at every brake-line connection (the rubber lines have 14-mm metal fittings crimped onto the ends). This requires patience and restraint. And even when you use slotted flare-nut wrenches that grab better than an open-end, you can still round the corners off a fitting. I’ve learned that instead of putting a dying strain on the fitting until it rounds, the thing to do is heat and wax it, try it, and if it doesn’t give, back off and re-apply heat and wax, then try again.

    Plus, I thought, I’ll leave myself an avenue for retreat. One method is to simply cut off the rubber hose at it goes into the fitting, enabling you to put a 14-mm socket or box end on the fitting instead of an open-end wrench, but then you’ve destroyed the hose. Leaving yourself an avenue for retreat means accepting the possibility that you might need to go with what you’ve got, and not destroy the hose.

    I used this cautious approach on the left rear, and it worked perfectly. Kugel is not a rusty car, but the rear rubber lines were clearly original and rock-hard, and after 44 years, it took a lot of effort to crack these connections loose.

    When I got the rubber line off, I cleaned the end and blew through it. It was completely plugged, at least with the pressure I could apply with my lungs. I’d made the right call; apparently I’d been driving Kugel with no rear brakes! It was likely that the inactive pedal travel I felt was either the rubber line blocked and swelling or allowing some small amount of fluid to pass under pressure, or some of both.

    I replaced it with the braided stainless line and moved on to the right side.

    The right side was really stuck. The access to the rubber-metal joint is blocked by the sway bar, so there’s a very narrow approach to get a wrench on the 11-mm fitting and press upward on the wrench. I thought I’d try one more cycle of heat and wax, and if that didn’t work, I’d pull the sway bar off. I was heating the joint when suddenly Ka-BLAM!

    It sounded like someone had lit off one of those New Year’s Eve poppers a foot from my face. What the—? The rubber brake hose had exploded! It was shredded at the end where it went into the metal fitting. I believe that the torch had heated the air up inside the plugged line, expanding it to the point where it blew the line clean off.

    I laughed out loud. So much for leaving myself a retreat! I noted that the silver lining was that now I could get a socket on the 14-mm fitting. I had the fitting apart in short order.

    Because Otto was occupying the lift, and because my garage is so overrun with crap, it’s difficult for me to get a car in the front spot in the garage with all four wheels in the air. So, since the butt-end of the car was still elevated, I bled the two rear-wheel cylinders. It’s unusual to interweave bleeding and component replacement in this manner—normally you replace what needs replacing and then bleed everything—but it made sense to me at the time.

    I have a number of brake-bleeding tools. There’s the pistol-grip vacuum style that’s now relegated to the shelf. There’s the Gunison’s EZ Bleed that pressurizes the brake reservoir with air from the left front tire. And there’s the Motive Power Bleeder that not only pressurizes but holds up to a gallon of fluid, pumping it into the reservoir. This has been my main bleeding tool ever since I bought it a few years ago. Some folks use it only to pressurize the reservoir, but I find that the fluid-pumping ability is really nice, because if you accidentally run the brake-fluid reservoir dry while bleeding, you pump so much air into the system that it may take several bleeding cycles to get it all back out. With the Motive, you dump a quart or two into its big tank and bleed away, secure in the knowledge that short of some catastrophic leak or major brain fart, you couldn’t possibly run the reservoir dry.

    The Motive had a bit of fluid in it. I added a fresh quart, connected it to the reservoir, and bled the right rear, then the left. I then turned the car around, leaving the Motive connected and sitting under the hood.

    I began working on the four lines on the front. Unlike the rears, the fronts were still flexible and looked like they’d been replaced at some point. In fact, the front calipers appeared recent as well, still wearing their gold finish. I realized that despite owning the car for five years, this was the first brake work I’d done on it. For a moment I entertained leaving the front rubber lines in place, but all those sunny go-get-’em aphorisms—you know, no time like the present, make hay while the sun shines—played in my brain, and I dived in.

    The relatively youthful appearance of the front-brake components, though, did not translate into easy removal. It took several heat-and-wax cycles to break the fittings free. When I undid the first fitting, though, a surprising amount of fluid came out, running into the catch tray. I thought, yeah, this is good, it’s normal for fluid to gravity-bleed out (unlike the rears, which were so plugged that no fluid came out), but gosh, isn’t a lot of fluid coming out?!

    I waited much longer than I should have for the residual fluid in the line to gravity-bleed out, but it still showed no sign of abating. Finally, the light bulb came on—you know, that big flashing light that says YOU’RE AN IDIOT.

    The Motive power bleeder was still hooked up.

    Of course fluid was still gushing out; it was under pressure. Good freakin’ lord. Whatever I thought I was doing by leaving the Motive connected and pressurized when I turned the car around, I don’t know.

    So those of you who read that and thought, “What is he doing?!” had it totally right. Actually, I do know; I was thinking about bleeding, not continuing to replace components, because, as I said, these are usually two separate steps.

    With age also comes, apparently, stupidity.

    I loosened the cap on the Motive to release the pressure. The fluid gush slowed, then stopped. I continued removing the right front rubber hoses. I didn’t snap anything. When I was done, I smiled at the pair of shiny braided lines.

    I then re-pressurized the Motive and began to bleed the right front—and that’s when things really began to go south.

    I noticed a steady drip of fluid beneath the left front of the car. It appeared to be coming from near the master cylinder. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to figure out that the leak was coming from the Motive itself, which I usually set in the engine compartment.

    You may recall that over the winter, I did a lot of work replacing the brake lines in my Suburban. Because the ’Burb uses a reservoir with a different cap than the 2002, I had to order the attachment to the Motive with the cap for the ’Burb. Adapting it to the Motive involved cutting off a permanent crimp-band hose clamp and replacing it with a traditional worm-and-roller clamp—which now appeared to be leaking. I tightened the clamp, re-pressurized the Motive, and continued bleeding.

    Partway through bleeding the right front, the leak under the car re-appeared. Surprisingly, the hose on the Motive just above the clamp had split, spraying brake fluid all over the engine compartment and windshield. I de-pressurized it, wiped up what I could, and resolved to hose things down with water when the car was down off the jack stands. I undid the hose clamp, cut the split section off, re-clamped it, put the Motive on the garage floor rather than in the engine compartment, and continued.

    Finally I got through bleeding the right front wheel and moved onto the left front. This time I remembered to de-pressurize the Motive. I got the old rubber hoses off, installed the new stainless lines, and began bleeding. Fluid came out, then air… then a lot of air.

    Not possible. No. No no no no no. NO! NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO! The mega-gush from removing the rubber hose on right front wheel while the system was still under pressure, combined with the leaking Motive, had run the reservoir dry. I’d just pumped air into the system!

    And I was out of brake fluid.

    I harrumphed my way to Autozone, bought a gallon of brake fluid, and realized that I would probably need to bleed all four wheels again to be certain that I’d removed all the air I’d just introduced. I filled up the Motive, pressurized it, and began bleeding.

    Then I noticed something strange.

    The Motive’s hose had split again—and this time it was quietly spraying fluid along the entire right side of my car. Oddly, the image reminded me of the fight scene at the end of Kill Bill I where Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman go at it with samurai swords under lightly falling snow in a Zen garden, the scenery completely at odds with the violent act underway (in my case, the fact that brake fluid eats paint). The car was still up on jack stands, so I couldn’t back it out of the garage and hose it down. I took wet soapy rags and wiped everything down as best as I could.

    I was so alarmed (justifiably) by the spraying of the car that it took me a while to notice the rapidly spreading puddle beneath the Motive itself. (For extra credit, go back through 30 years of Hack Mechanic articles and cite every reference where I express my disgust at the smell and feel of brake fluid.)

    Screw the Motive; I hauled out the old Gunison’s EZ Bleed and finished up the left front wheel. Then I moved back to the right front, which stillhad a lot of air in it. Since I hadn’t used the Gunison in a while, I’d forgotten how much fluid comes out when you pressurize the reservoir from the tire, and came perilously close to running the reservoir dry a second time.

    I was going to re-bleed the rears, but I tested the pedal and it came up good and firm. I got the car out of the garage, washed it, and drove it. The brakes feel subtly better. It’s not like Kugel has suddenly turned into the M coupe, but the travel-without-action part of the braking appears to be gone.

    See? I’m totally in control of this whole prep-for-aa-1,900-mile-drive thing.

    As I send this, I’m off to meet Brian Ach—yes, the one whose ’73 2002tii died on the way to the Vintage last year, to be resurrected by Yours Truly. Brian, his wife, Michelle, Gerta the tii, and I are going to caravan down to the Vintage. I am their wingman. There’s a good amount of rain forecast (folks are already making the requisite come down off those towers and don’t try the brown acid Woodstock jokes), but I am committed.

    Because age, apparently also brings a good deal of stubbornness and tenacity.—Rob Siegel

    Rob’s book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic is available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get a personally inscribed copy through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com. His new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, can be pre-ordered from Bentley Publishers. Use the coupon code “BMWCCAELECTRIC” for 30% off list.