So, having had a look at these hoses from Spectrum I feel they are not fit for purpose due to them having used compression fittings and olives on the pressure hose. I don't know why they did this as the whole point was that they would re-use the original fittings, but instead they have cut off the hose tails and replaced them all with compression fittings. These need some considerable skill to seal up properly and tbh I don't have said skills. A hydraulic-Yoda doing such things every day might be able to get them to work, but for the average home-gamer I do not believe they are a safe solution on a 130-bar hydraulic system, and neither does the hydraulic specialist who looks after the rams on my lift. He was not complimentary when he saw the hose.
They actually made quite a nice job of the return hose right up until the 90 degree bend at the front end where it meets the cooler. Unfortunately they used high-pressure hose here which is far too rigid to line up with the cooler which will either result in a messy engine bay, or will just stress and ultimately fracture the end of the cooler. The return hose is not that big a deal though as they are easy enough to recover.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel for the pressure hose, with a safer and cheaper solution. I have observed that the front half of the pressure hose actually doesn't corrode that badly - its really only the back half with the hard line. The front half is the difficult bit with the special lining, whereas the back half is just a 10mm pipe. On that basis, I split one at the union and left the rusty union in Evapo-Rust for a few days and it actually cleaned up really well. I then took the back piece to my the aforementioned local specialist who found a stock 90 degree fitting would fit the thread on the front hose, and so swaged this on to a new piece of hose with the original rack fitting at the other end. As far as I can tell from mockup this will work perfectly, and leaves the front complicated hose completely stock. It'll need some heat sleeve where the new flexible hose passes over the exhaust (which I think is why the original hoses have the steel hard line section in them) but otherwise looks like it will do the job just fine.
I will post pics of the new piece later. As usual, I need to try it on one of my own projects but I am pretty confident it will work
