Now the parking brake needs to be pulled from the rear. That made the stock cable and linkage that came on the Pantera obsolete for my application. Good thing, because I didn't have any of the stock parts - remember, this was a junk yard find and almost everything was missing! So it was time to fabricate something that could work on my car.
I started with going through all my spare parts and looking at the various pull cables I collected over the years. I had parts from my old 66 Galaxie and others I pulled from junk yards trying to modify brakes on both the Galaxie and my 65 pickup. I finally settled on an old clutch cable from a 1990 Mustang GT that was the engine and transmission donor for my 65 F100. That cable was almost perfect in size and length for the ebrake on the Pantera. I only had one cable so I ordered a second one for about $40.
While I waited on the other cable to arrive I started to fabricate the arm that will hold the cables in place. I wanted this arm to be pretty beefy while not being too heavy. The picture below shows what I came up with after a bunch of work.
The arm slips over the 10mm bolt that was originally used to hold the stock ebrake assy. I put 10mm sleeve bearings into the arm I made to make sure it slides on the mounting bolt with ease. To the hook on the underside of the ebrake arm in the cabin I fabricated the following adjustable linkage.
This linkage can be adjusted to take up any slack in the system. Pretty simple and not to difficult to make. I know it doesn't look like it came off the assembly room floor, but who cares? This car was destined to be scrap metal so anything I can do to keep it alive is moving in the right direction, IMHO!
I also had to fabricate a bracket to hold the clutch cable ends just behind the pull arm. The photo below shows this bracket that I made and bolted to a cross member under the Pantera.
The clutch cables ends had to be ground down a little bit in order to fit the mounting point on the ebrake itself. I just took my time and made sure that I cut away just enough to give me a tight fit into the brake bracket. Here's a shot of the end of the clutch cable going into the ebrake itself.
I put a nut and bolt to hold the cable into the ebrake assy.
I did a bunch of routing of the clutch cables to get them to go as straight to the front of the car a possible without being interfered with by the exhaust or the shocks. Here's how I finally decided to route the cable. I'm not sure this will be their final position, but it is a place to start.
Then I put it all together. Here's a few shots of the final product.
Works like a champ. I don't have wheels on the car yet so I can't tell how tight the brakes hold. I do know that I can put a lot of pressure on them from inside the car and get them to release when I want them to. We will see how they really operate when we put the car on the road. For now, I think this was a nice clean way to adapt to what I had to do to make her work.
