Emergency Brake

I was back at my neighbor Mike's shop the other day and asked if he had any 1/2" round bar stock.  He did, so I went through my notes from working on Lowell Brown's emergency brake to find the dimensions of the ends for the cable.  If you remember, I just have squished nuts soldered onto the ends of the cable rather than fitted ends brazed on.

The size of an end is 1/2" in diameter, with two sides cut off to end up with 5/16" stock left.  Then the thickness is 1/4" and there's a 5/32" hole drilled through the center for the cable.

So to start, I cut the sides off leaving the 5/16" in the center.  I used Mike's 36" metal cutting band saw.

Then, I trued the two sides using a large disc sander.  After that, it was time to cut the two pieces, each 1/4" long.  Here you can see the cold saw almost through cutting the first piece.  A cold saw is like a chop saw for wood, only with metal cutting blade with coolant to cool the work.  It makes very accurate square cuts.

Then it was back to the disc sander to clean off the small bit of metal left at the bottom of the cut.  After that, over to the drill press to drill the hole for the cable to pass through.

Here's the two finished pieces.

Now I just have to take apart my emergency brake cable, braze the new ends on in the right place and re-adjust everything.

Now that I have my lift, some things are a lot easier to tackle.  Today I decided to finish the emergency brake work.  I first took off the old sweat soldered on nuts from the ends of the cables.  I compared the length to what we measured on Lowell Brown's and it was almost the same length.  But I had at least an inch and half too much cable on mine as I couldn't adjust it tight enough.  Then I realized that the length of the cable is entirely dependent on the lengths of the two sheaths that the cable runs in.  If they are shorter, then the cable has to be shorter.  It's clear that the sheath has been replaced on the left side of my car and it is barely long enough.  The turns are tighter than on the right with less play everywhere.

I brazed one end on the cable when it was out of the car.

Then I threaded the other end back through the sheath, around the pulley and through the other sheath, greasing it as it went into each sheath.  Then I put all of the adjustments in the center of their range and pulled everything tight.  By measuring the extra at the loose end, I determined that I needed to take off one and a half inches.  However, I forgot to pull the brake lever on that side tight, so I left more slack than I would have liked.  After brazing that end on, I fit all of the clevis pins in place and proceeded to make adjustments.

There's an adjustment on each sheath that's on the left in the left picture above.  The rod from the handbrake lever also has an adjustment shown in the picture on the right.  By using these to almost the fullest extent, I was able to take out the slack and make the emergency brake tight.  Well, tight enough that I couldn't move the wheels by hand.  I haven't taken it out and tried it on a hill yet.