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Sold my grandpa's '89 pickup after the brake line blew in the Wendy's drive-thru
I was sitting in line at the Wendy's on 5th waiting on a Frosty when the pedal went straight to the floor, so I coasted into a parking spot and a guy in a Corolla gave me a ride to Napa for a $14 line. My grandpa would've fixed it in his driveway with a flashlight in his teeth, but I stood there with my phone watching a video and wondering if it was even worth it. Anyone else fix a brake line in a parking lot, or did you just call the tow and let it go?
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mason_black12d ago
The part that gets me is how fast the math changes once you're standing in that lot. A $14 line plus a borrowed ride turns into a whole afternoon on your back in gravel, and if you strip the fitting or round off the flare nut you're calling a tow anyway and you still own the parts. Your grandpa had two things you don't have in that Wendy's parking lot, daylight and a bench vise and a parts store that knew him. The real loss here isn't the truck, it's that the knowledge died before the truck did. Could you have done the job with a YouTube video? Maybe, but doing it alone on cold ground with traffic rolling past is a different animal than doing it in your own driveway with the right tools within reach. Was the frame still solid or was the brake line just the first thing to go?
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