Replacing broken handbrake cable - 08/08/04

I pulled up outside the chip shop the other night, pulled the handbrake on and there was a loud bang and the lever flew right up to the top! The near side cable had broken and the load balancing plate means the other side wasn't working either.

Starting the engine with no handbrake meant holding the brakes with my left foot while pressing the throttle with my right foot! I went straight to the autofactors the next day and got a pair of new cables, thinking I might as well replace both. I nearly fell over when I had to pay, £26 each! I call that daylight robbery!

I set aside Sunday to fit the new cables. Read up in the Haynes manual how to do it, not much help there then! Had a good look and felt pretty happy I could do it okay. Here you can see where the cable has gone slack.

Sunday morning was an absolute scorcher so not great for manual work but at least I'd be in the shade mostly! The first thing I did was slack off the adjusting nut and pop out the lugs on the ends of the cables.

Next I undid the brackets that hold the cables further along. One of them took plenty of WD40 but eventually came loose. For some reason the other cable wasn't in one of the brackets but zip tied to it instead. I'm sure someone had a good reason!

Due to the leaf over conversion my cables take a slightly different route below the chassis instead of over it, otherwise they wouldn't be long enough. This brings them in quite shallow along the springs. I guess you could get around that on a short wheelbase by using the long wheelbase cables!

Right, time to get the wheels off and get the cables out of the brakes. Out come the shiny new axle stands from Screwfix, not bad for under £10! I would have preferred to have them further apart but it was tricky to do that and fit the jack in. Maybe next time I'll try it the other way round.

Of course having no handbrake means the hubs spin round when you try to undo the nuts on them! I got round this by wedging a piece of wood between two wheel studs and then against the ground. I wonder if that's how everyone does it.

There we go out it comes! Okay not quite that easy. It takes a bit of fiddling to get the cable out of all the little brackets holding it, especially with the spring fighting you all the time! I then had to tap the end of the cable sheath out of the hub with a bar and hammer. The other side was slightly easier as this was where the cable had snapped so the spring and end of the cable just fell out! There's not much left on those brake shoes either.

Fitting the new cables should have been the reverse of removing the old ones. However, the first cable I tried fitting turned out not to be long enough! When I checked the new cables against the old ones it turned out that this one was shorter than the rest. After swearing and stomping around moodily in the heat I decided to use the longer new cable and the unsnapped old cable with some insulation tape repairs! I didn't mind saving myself £26 for one cable!

When I took the cable back they told me they were supposed to be different lengths for left and right. The cables on my Samurai take exactly the same route either side so that doesn't sound right to me. The autofactors only have listings for SJ 413's so maybe Samurai's are different. I'll have to have a look at some!

Wow my handbrake works again! It's still not very good but that's probably due to the bigger wheels and worn brake shoes. I'll have to change the shoes fairly soon. For some reason the foot brakes feel much firmer now that the handbrake is working again. I'll have to have a good look at the mechanism some time to figure out why!