Kodiak Hydraulic Brake Hose Review
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Review of the Kodiak Hydraulic Brake Hose
Hi there, trailer owners. Today we're going to be taking a look at Kodiak's Flexible Hydraulic Brake Hoses with 3/16 Brake Line Fittings. These are available in either 1' up to 24' in varying sizes.These flexible brake hoses are going to be a great replacement or upgrade for your trailer's existing brake lines or brake hoses. I personally find that installing flexible lines is quite a bit easier than bending and molding new brake lines. So if you have the option to do this, you will appreciate how much easier it is, and I like that they're great for either drum brakes or disc brake systems. We're currently using ours with a brake actuator that has a maximum pressure of 1600 psi and these lines can handle that with no problem.
We're able to handle the extremely high pressures due to our rubberized hoses that meet both DOT and SAE standards and the brass fittings that have double ferrule crimp on the ends. This will ensure a more durable, stronger connection with two points of contact to also ensure that there's no seepage or leakage.I like that they added a small piece of brake line coming out of here. This gap here makes it easy to get your line wrench on there. It fits right over the small line to get onto your nut so you can make sure you get those tightened down properly. You always want to use line wrenches when working with brake hoses or brake lines because the fittings on the end here are made of brass, which is a softer metal than your typical bolts are that you're used to working with.
If you need to set a line wrenches, you can grab a set here at etrailer.com as well. Now that we've covered some of the features, let's go over the installation together so you can get these installed on your trailer.Well, here you can see our predicament. As we we're trying to bleed the brakes, but we noticed we had a brake leak, and our leak was coming from the flex hose that we had that came from our T fitting here to our front axle on our trailer. So I went ahead to go replace the line, and of course the T fitting here broke off inside the line. So we're going to attempt to remove these lines, but based on how this worked out, I'm pretty sure we're going to have to replace all of these lines.
We'll also need to replace our T fitting. Since we're upgrading to flexible lines, we're going to be using a T fitting that has all female ends on it. This is pretty much just going to go right here, but this line and this line are now going to be flexible.It's pretty straight forward on how it would work. You simply unscrew this line and then thread in your new line. But when you get in a situation like this where they're all rusted up, you are likely going to break a line.
You can soak it in some penetrating oil and then slowly try it over time. Sometimes you can get it free without busting it loose, and other times you just have to replace it. We're kind of at the point where we need to replace ours due to corrosion. So this line is essentially going to go here. Our lines are going to thread into our T, and they are just going to route where our old lines used to be. I'm going to go ahead and bust these lines off here now, and then we'll show you what it looks like when we've got the new ones on.This is what our replacement is going to look like. We've replaced the T-fitting here and we've hooked our flexible lines into it. We're using various length flexible lines to achieve this. We have our 7' coming out the side of the T here, going back to our rear axle. We've used a 1-1/2' to go to the brake hose for our front axle here and then a 15' flexible that goes all the way out to the brake actuator at the front of the trailer. They attach using the brass nuts at the end. The ends of our flexible brake hoses are already pre-flared for you. So you simply thread it into your T fitting, your brake caliper, your brake actuator, wherever you need to thread it into as long as it accepts fittings for a 3/16 brake line.Once you've completed replacing your lines, all that's left now is to bleed the brakes. Top up your brake fluid, you'll pressurize it, and then an assistant can open the bleeder valve at the caliper to let the fluid out and get all the air out of the system. You just simply rinse and repeat at each brake caliper, starting from the furthest one away, and then going to the closest towards your master cylinder. That completes our look at Kodiak's Flexible Hydraulic Brake Hoses.
Info for these parts were:
Installed by:
Jeff D
Installed by:
David F
Video Edited:
Dustin K
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Royce H.
10/3/2020
Why 2 bleed valves ? And does it make any difference which one you use to bleed the brakes? Thank You!