Trying to replace the high pressure hose on my mom's 2000 Elantra. The rubber hose connects to the hard line down on the passenger side wheel well near the steering rack/tie rod end area.

I can't for the life of me get the rubber line and hard line separated. The biggest issue is that there's just flat no room to get to it. I had to bend the hard line down a bit to access it through the steering rack/tie rod rack cut-out but it's still borderline inaccessible. Even using two vice grips I couldn't get it to budge.

Is there some secret here? Tips?

I noticed some of the aftermarket high pressure hoses come with that hard line already attached. But in that case you'd be in a similar situation trying to get the old hard line disconnected from the steering rack. It looks utterly inaccessible as well.

 

Well, even though nobody had any tips I thought I'd update this. I hate it when I find a thread after some Internet searching with my exact problem only to see the OP never followed up or explained how he fixed it. Anyway, so maybe this will help somebody out there in the interwebz at some point.

Originally I bent the rubber hose to hard line joint DOWN and tried to work with it through the tie rod opening. Today I decided to bend the joint all the way up as high as I could get it and work at it in the engine bay. The hard line is attached to the firewall with a bracket and 10 mm bolt down near the steering rack. I had to remove that to allow me to bend the hard line up higher.

Here was my final set-up. After a lot of struggle I finally got it off. As you can see I had a vice grip on the hard line side, then used a 19 mm wrench on the rubber hose side. You have to be careful because you're right in there with the A/C lines.