Alright, a close friend (hopeful girlfriend) has a '91 Ford Tempo and she blew out a rear brake line a while ago.

A buddy of mine used some new line and a compression fitting to replace the damaged section. In the process of bleeding the new line, the other side blew. Replaced it but had to come back another day to finish bleeding the lines, due to rusted bleeder screws (**** those things btw!)


So another buddy of mine and I went over there, freed the bleeder, and upon bleeding, blew one of the back lines again, this time further up.

Completely fed up with 18 year old brake lines, I decided to replace all 4 lines, all the way to the drums/calipers.


All the line fittings at the brakes are 3/16th fittings. That's all good. I've even got plenty of tubing.

However, every single fitting on the master cylinder is a different size! One of them, the 3/16th screwed right in. Another, I had to put a 3/16th to 1/8th adapter. Somehow, the 1/8th is bigger than the 3/16th...

Now, there's a really big one that I'm fairly sure is a 1/2" fitting and the last one, I'm not sure, I'd guess 7/16th seeing as none of the others fit.


Where the heck can I find 3/16th to 1/2 and 7/16th adapters?
Where can I go to make sure those are the size fittings I need?
And who the heck thought 4 different sized fittings were a good idea?

Try autozone/advance and see what they carry. Also try a Napa store.

Buy a whole bunch of different sizes and return the extras after.

The Ford Motor Company

Alright, I have to say, for all the stuff I get at Advanced Auto Parts and how expensive NAPA usually is, I truely love my neighborhood NAPA.

I asked Dale if he had a master cylinder in stock to try and test fittings in. He did me one better.

He pulled up the master in the computer and wrote down the size of all 4 of the fittings on it! They are metric aparently.

M10x1.0
M12x1.0
M16x1.5
M18x1.5

He even has adapters too! I just need to go back there and figure out if they are bubble flare or inverted flare because th eone chunk of line I had, I seem to have misplaced. So I need to get over there and see which fittings they are and from then on it's smooth sailing.

I'll finally be able to go see her without my inability to fix her busted car weighing down on my heart. *sigh of relief*

Ahh the memories... I dont think I have ever hated a car as much as my old tempo.

Glad you found a fix, hope her tempo is better than the one i had!

Haha, my Tempo got me into a low speed collision when it slid on wet leaves... The hood wouldn't latch right after that, so I had it tied down with some speaker wire I had laying around. Eventually that snapped one day... hood was a bit more banged up after wrapping around the windshield. I tied it back down with some bungies and it lasted for a little while longer... Third time the hood popped it finally cracked the windshield, so I took her to the junkyard. We only paid $100 for it, had to fix a locked up wheel and she was good to drive.

A classic example of a car where the motor will outlast everything else, including the brake lines and hood latches