Parking brake

Brakes are an essential park of any vehicle (apart from unicycles) so I thought it time to fix up the parking brake.

I'd already run the cables, and physically mounted the brake, so it was just a case of putting it all together and adjusting it, should take 10 mins.

Several weeks later, I've now mostly finished it. I'm sure there's an easy way of getting the cables tight, but I didn't find it. 

I very much dislike these cables.

The handbrake has a short cable coming from it which goes into a joiner which in turn attaches to the cables from the brakes. The joiner doesn't attach to anything and just floats. This is fine, but getting the cables tight and then holding everything in place took a few attempts. 

While playing with the handbrake, I realised that I hadn't bolted it down with big enough bolts, so I decided to use M10s and took everything apart.

Now, I'd used rivnuts, so I had to drill those out, but when you do that, they just spin so I ended up hack-sawing them whilst trying to hold on to them so that they didn't drop into the chassis and spend the rest of eternity rattling around annoying me. This took a while but finally they were out and the handbrake was now bolted in a lot more firmly with the M10s.

I connected the cables back up, and this is when I discovered the adjuster on the handbrake itself. I wound this all the way down, did everything again and then adjusted back up and as far as handbrakes go, it works. You pull it up and it applies the brakes, sweet. It's just not quite good enough and all needs tightening up a bit more. I did pin the cables down in the end with some p-clips which isn't shown in the above pic. This was a pain as there was no room to work and the p-clips kept wanting to spring around the garage. Lots of deep breaths were taken during this process.

All cuts made

The next stage was getting the tunnel to fit over the handbrake. This also meant cutting slots out for the chassis cross bars as I wanted the tunnel flush with the floor. Some people built the tunnel up which means you don't need to cut it but I didn't like that so much.

The slots were measured about 15 times before I cut them, and by gods were kind to me as everything lined up nicely. I could test fit the tunnel, albeit without the slot cut out of the top for the handbrake itself. So far, so good.

The final part of the puzzle was cutting the top hole, so I put this off for a bit, then one lazy cold Sunday, decided that I'd brave the weather and sort it out.

Armed with some masking tape and a red sharpie, I marked it up, and it was a little easier than expected, in fact, I'd measured too well and hadn't quite given myself enough slack, so recut the hole a little bigger.

The end result is a working handbrake and a tunnel that fits! I do have a leather shroud thing for the handbrake to make it look nicer, but there's no point putting that on yet. Now I can put the second fuel tank back in again and move on.

Practially on the road...