First, I have to admit that I lost one of my parking brake cable brackets/standoffs/"mystery part" to some...out on the road.....duh!
So, what is a guy to do? We make one!!!
I have this one:
And I have some raw material, from a 1969 Cougar/Mustang window regulator. .100" thick is pretty darned close to what the original was made of, except for the back stiffener portion which was made of aprox .075" thick material....don't have it....!
The left and right parts are mirror images of each other for the most part, so I am able to copy the one piece that I do have. In the final fitting stage, I tweeked them both slightly, to fit the cable positioning better (IMHO!)...
After some measuring, marking, cutting (hacksaw!), drilling, bending, filing, fitting, welding, cutting, filing, fitting, welding and filing, I ended up with these!
Just put them in primer earlier and will hit them with some silver paint tomorrow.
Another member brought his brackets to the PCNC meeting the other night, not knowing exactly what they were.... His were made of the .075" material throughout, and instead of having the notch in the "Z" shaped piece as seen in the picture above (4th one), his were simply straight pieces bent on each end with the angled reinforcement piece welded in place. MUCH simpler to fab and implement.
Now, after looking at mine on the car for a while, I understand why mine may need the relief cut in them. My cable does not connect directly to the parking brake lever, but uses a small offset "coupler" of sorts. I think that these allow that coupler to fit without interfering when moving. Depending on the implementation, your mileage may vary, you may not need the coupler or the notches.....
Here is a picture of that coupler and my LH bracket (from the post "e-brake cables") :
It never ceases to amaze me, the quality of the welding on these small bits and pieces....I'm betting that this was all gas welding.... I tried my best to make small welds with my MIG welder, and I'm sure if I practiced for a few hours that I could do it.... I got a couple of the welds looking close, but a couple ended up with a few mm's of extra wire laid down.......
I also noticed some cracks in the old original unit, no doubt from getting hammered around by the mufflers and inlet pipes! I took advantage of these cracks to bend the original bracket up for more clearance at the top of the muffler inlet pipe. The cables will just clear the front of the mufflers but I'm afraid that at suspension unload (think big whoopdee doos out on the road!) that they will be in contact with the inlet pipes.... Not much to do about it....
While the LH cable routing was easy enough and there was room to run it up inside the frame, on top of the bottom frame rail to give it a direct shot to the stand-off bracket, the RH side is not so easy. I'm fighting with how I want to run it. If I try to go the same route above the lower frame rail, I run into the shift linkage..... Not acceptable..... I can go low, but the cable wants to seek balance...and once it obtains balance, it pulls down onto the RH inlet pipe.... Do I use tie-wraps to secure it to the frame, or some other means of holding into position, ie hose clamp.....?????
I really want this to work primarily, but also to last without buggering something else up in the process....or make it look like a major kluge job!!! ...not that the factory didn't do that already!
AND, it looks like I will need to make my eyelet to eyelet cable length about an inch longer than stock to fit properly....or so...but we're not done yet......
Cable fitting to come!
Ciao!
Steve