Parking Brake

Due to the fact that I decided to use Wilwood brakes I had to come up with a parking brake mechanism for my Pantera. If you check out my post titled "Rearend Rebuild" you will get the details on all that had to be done to get the rear end in shape with the Wilwood brakes I chose. I used WILWOOD MC4 MECHANICAL PARKING BRAKE CALIPERS FOR 0.81" WIDE DISCS to make my e-brake work. It is definitely a little on the light weight side but I think it will work just fine. I did have to do a little grinding on the body of the brake assy to get the pads free enough to install them on the rotors. Not a big deal, but we forewarned. Here's a shot of the brakes I used.

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.