It's not a Ford that I was working on earlier this evening, but it applies to any vehicle with some age on it. I'm helping a friend with first vehicles for her twin 16 year old daughters. One of them is a '99 Explorer sport 2 door 4x4 (4.0 sohc), the other is an '87 Dakota (3.9 V6). One of the conditions I set for prepping the vehicles for the girls was that they needed to be safe.This means making sure the steering, suspension and brakes are in good condition. The Explorer had some bad hard brake lines that needed replacing due to rust / rot, and the Dakota needed new rotors (warped & thin), and I'm doing the rubber brake lines on both. Typical of any 20+ year old vehicle the outside of the rubber lines were powdery, and my usual method involves cutting the hose in the middle in case I need to heat up a fitting that's seized. On the Dakota, even with the rubber line already cut in half when I heated the flare fitting, the remaining chunk of hose still exploded when the fluid got hot. The center passage of the rubber hose was so swollen I couldn't even fit a finishing nail down the middle of it. That explains the warped and thin rotors, foot off the brake pedal, fluid couldn't flow back up out of the calipers, keeping the front brakes partially engaged.

 

Aortic dissection. Can't see them from the outside, but act like a one-way valve on the inside.

 

Cool!

Glad you're doing it right!