Line Lock Installation on 180sx

OK, Now there's a few things you should understand before you start playing with this. Installing a line lock requires modifying your front brakes, which can be dangerous and/or illegal. If you have no experience with brake line work, you may want to at a minimum call a friend who does to help you. We ran into a few snags the first time we did this. The second time around was a cinch.

Before you get started, you will need a brake line cutting tool, a flaring tool, a line lock (we used the Summit which is exactly like the Hurst Roll Control, but only costs $90) and you will also need the installation kit that Summit sells for $30 (its free if you buy their line lock as well) Unless you have access to brake line adapter fittings.

Here is Brett's 180sx. His car will be the guinea pig for this little job today.

First off, there are two outlets from the master cylinder on a 180sx for the front brakes. Of course they are not up front like you would expect, but they are in the back. We plugged the rear most line (with that little adapter fitting into a short line into another adapter to a plug - we couldn't find the right size plug for the master cylinder)

The middle connection is the one we will use to work the line lock and front brakes now.

Here's a pic of the Summit Line Lock as it will go in the car. The install requires three of the brass adapter fittings to go in the line lock. The holes in the housing itself are not flared and will leak if you just screw a line into them. The Summit install kit only includes two of these fittings, so you better find someone who has one laying around. (thats what we did)

This is a bad angle to show what we did, but one of the brake lines is plugged into the rear (it requires some cutting, bending, and attaching one of the summit fittings on the end) and the little short line is the input from the master cylinder. The trick here was to make the lines close to where you need them, screw them in, then carefully bend the line lock into place. It's very tricky to make a line that goes in straight.

The open hole in the front is where we were waiting on an extra adapter fitting to screw in there.

Here's another angle to give you an idea of how we formed the lines.

Here you can see the other front brake line waiting off the right down below. We couldn't stretch this line enough to reach the line lock, so we opted to extend it with some of the pieces of the install kit. We put a summit fitting on the end of the line, the constructed a simple extension piece. They are connected with a dual-female connector.

Here is the final product with the extension in place. It of course leaked from a few places, so we used some teflon tape and tightened it a LOT. Be careful not to strip anything out while tightening.

Another note is that when screwing the adapter fittings into the line lock, you should screw something into them while wrenching them down. This will prevent the weak adapter from crushing under the pressure of the wrench.

Now refill the system and bleed the front brakes. Your back brakes shouldn't need bleeding as long as you didn't do anything with the front most port on the master cylinder.

All you have left to worry about at this point is installing the electrical portion of the system. This is quite simple: Just run power to the switch, then take the other wire off the switch and go to the line lock red wire. Take the line lock black wire and hook it to a good ground. Your line lock should only work when the key is on, but it doesn't matter too much.

Using the line lock is simple. You push the brake, hold the button, then you can let off the brakes but the fronts will hold. Now do your burnout and just as you want to stop you need to let off the button. (You don't want to hold it down when you let off the gas, this can make an ugly situation as the tires stop spinning very rapidly. Just make sure there's nobody in front of you when you do this!)

Now, Let's go roast some tires!!