A month? Good lord! I have spent a lifetime of freeing up rusted stuff and I have never soaked anything for any length of time with any magic elixir. Heat it up and take it apart.

You may be able to just get the weld on fittings and reuse the original pipe if its not too thin. I'm probably going to have to do a similar job here someday and am too wondering where to get those fittings at. Wabtec has them but I'm not sure how easy it would be to purchase from them.

https://www.wabteccorp.com/freight-car/braking-systems/pneumatic-components/fittings

I’ve had good luck with a 50/50 mix of ATF and acetone. I usually do two or three applications over a couple hours. It does a good job of penetrating the rust and lubes enough to lower the torque needed to bust something loose. It seems penetrate better than Kroil. I’ll use heat as a last resort or on things I know I won’t damage.

I have a call into Wabtec for some brake shoe info and I’ll ask about their fittings… if they call me back. I wish they had a catalog online.

NYAB has a nice guide to welded fittings online.

https://www.nyabproducts.com/wp-content ... -Guide.pdf

Looking at that NYAB catalog, you could probably just replace your lines with hoses between the main reservoir and the pipe bracket and save yourself a lot of time bending and welding pipe.

I wonder if the compression rings (e.g. 534269) are still available from WABTEC.

I'm pretty sure that bolt centers are the same as a standard air brake flange fitting. So the gasket e.g. 93986 is still widely available.

You have a few options. If the compression rings are still obtainable, heat the fitting with an oxy-acetylene torch. The rubber parts will be destroyed. Unscrew the hexagonal nut and also remove the two hex cap screws holding the flange to the reservoir. Clean up the fitting, clean up the surface of the pipe, and reassemble with new gasket and compression ring. This is assuming you don't have another problem like a crack or split in the pipe.

Based on the condition as seen in the photo, I doubt you'll have any success tightening the compression even if you could get it to turn (e.g. with penetrating oil)

If that route doesn't work, purchase an AAR flange fitting with a female pipe thread inlet. if you can cut
the pipe back and thread it, put in a coupling or a union and a short length of pipe to connect the new flange. But maybe the pipe is total garbage, and you'll have to take it all apart back to the next accessible fitting.

I’m going to measure the OD of the pipes to see how much meat is left. If sufficient, we may just clean up the ends and weld on AAR flanges. If there’s not enough meat, we’ll likely go with new pipe.

The reservoir is next to the valves making the pipes a wide, shallow, “U” shape about 4’ or 5’ long (going by memory). Hence, my reluctance to use hoses. There is no intermediate support so they would have been prone to vibration which is what likely caused the old gaskets to begin leaking after a while since we started running the car. Right now, the leaks are so very slight and easy to miss unless you’re sitting under the car and watching for 5 minutes. I finally caught it on the third round of thorough soaping on a humid day.

> A month? Good lord! I have spent a lifetime of freeing up rusted stuff and I have never soaked anything for any length of time with any magic elixir. Heat it up and take it apart.

I too have spent a lifetime freeing up rusted stuff, starting with Liquid Wrench about 55 years ago. Regardless of which magic elixir you use, it has to have time to penetrate into the threads, and the longer you wait, the more it penetrates (and why I recommend repeated applications over a period of at least several days). Squirting it on and then immediately trying to unscrew things all too frequently fails. Heat can be used on either the inner piece or the outer piece depending on the situation, but this depends on 1) whether the heating process will damage things (like annealing heat treated parts or warping components) and 2) how impatient you are. And WD-40 is junk because the manufacturer degraded the formula about 35 years ago. My recommendation for using turpentine comes from a WABCo service center employee many years ago.

Good news. The pipes are in good condition. Measured at 1.047” OD after removing the surface rust. With a bit of cleanup and trim, we’re going to replace the Wabcoseals with welded flanges.

Thanks everyone for the education.