2003 Zafira in particular. Car failed its MOT on excessively corroded brake lines. Front to rear on nearside and both rears.

I’m assuming that the front to rear is just the straight section in the middle and that the rears hopefully wont involve dropping the fuel tank. Sound like a reasonable assumption?

I have a neighbour who can do the necessary bleeding and safety stuff so that’s not an issue.

Also – coil springs on the rear – should they be replaced in pairs?

Should have painted them with underseal before the test. 😉
Buy a roll of copper nickel brake pipe and a flaring tool.
Ideally, you want new fittings as well, although you can reuse the old ones.

You don’t have to follow the original routing for brake lines it just needs to be secured properly. I came to replace the front to rear pipes on my rover75 a couple of years ago and routed them around the rear of the fuel tank instead of over.

It’s also pretty easy to get the replacement lines in places- I was a bit bothered about the one that went over the fuel tank on mine, but in the end that bit was dead easy.

What wasn’t so easy was that by the time the pipes had died, all the unions were corroded to buggery, so I ended up having to replace everything, even the flexies and some perfectly good pipe.

I ended up getting a garage to make up the pipe ends- I’d heard too much about how essential it is to have perfectly flared ends. That turned out to be cobblers, the garage-made ones didn’t have perfect ends but worked fine. If I was doing it again i’d do the whole thing myself.

Getting the heatshield off was the hardest part tbh! Terrible job.

There is IMO a lot of knack to this job. I didn’t have it and my routing/bending was crap. I ended up making the whole just safe enough to get the car driven from my house (where the lines had split, leaving me unable to move) toth garage, where the mechanic almost fainted at how bad a bodge it was.

http://www.beal.org.uk/automotive/brake-pipe-nuts/cat_68.html

These guys are great for copper pipe and unions. It’s an easy enough job if you have a pipe cutter and flaring tools, it helps a lot too if you have high axle stands for access.

for the mot you could fit just one coilspring if thats all it failed on. non-genuine springs usually seem visually different to genuine springs so really fit a pair as may have dirrent spring properties to the other/older spring.