Mountain Biking - Heat-shrink tubing to fit braided XT hoses

I have the XT 755 disk brakes with the braided steel hoses, but I don't like their floppiness and paint-scratching qualities. Rather than spending £30 changing to plastic hoses, someone suggested I use heat-shrink polyolefin (sp?) tubing to give the hoses a plastic coating (sort of like DIY Goodrich, I guess). Has anyone actually done this? What type/size tubing did you use? I worked out that to get it over the banjo and shrink down to be snug on the hose, it would need a 3:1 shrink ratio, but that seems to be hard to get, at least in the UK. Also, I'm concerned that in shrinking, the tube will become inflexible, which isn't what you want with a brake hose.

Any thoughts/experience?

Thanks, Bryan

that sounds like a good idea, sorry I don't have any experience with using shrink wrap for that issue, but I have used the low tech approach, to quiet and protect the paint on my '03 Giant, I cut pieces of an old inner tube in circles and used rubber cement to glue them on the frame at the contact points. worked pretty well and as the circles were only as big as needed for that area, I did not think they looked too bad.

I have not done the shrink tube on my mtbs but on my motorcycles. I believe if you get tubing big enough to fit the banjo it mat not shrink enough for the brake lines. We always removed the lines and banjo bolts then installed the shrink tubing.

DBD:beer:

I have not done the shrink tube on my mtbs but on my motorcycles. I believe if you get tubing big enough to fit the banjo it mat not shrink enough for the brake lines. We always removed the lines and banjo bolts then installed the shrink tubing.

DBD:beer:

It would be much easier if I could get the banjos off, then I could use 2:1 tubing which is much easier to obtain. Anyone know if you can get the banjos off the XT hoses? There's a ferrule-type thing joining them, is this unscrewable?