oddball

Just a few notes on the Lokar emergency brake cables. I used part numbers EC-8001U and EC-80FU. For the most part it's pretty smooth. This is on a '72 with drum brakes.

*) Connection to the foot pedal is direct with the cable. No issues. I used a washer between the E clip and the body because the E clip isn't much larger than the access hole. That kept it in place a little better.

*) You have to fabricate something to manage the hookup between front and rear cables. Well, you can screw the brackets straight to the floor, but then you have screws poking up through your carpet. Here's my setup. This is even easier without the frame reinforcement kit in the way. I just bent a U channel out of 22ga steel, about 17" long and mounted to the two rearward floor braces, then screwed the brackets through the U channel into a 16ga steel plate. Why? Because Home Depot has 2'x1' 22ga sheet and 1'x1' 16ga sheet - it's just what I had on hand. Although you can probably just use the braces and have the brackets further apart. There's no particular distance maximum on that intermediate section - just a minimum if 9" for the parts, adjustment and movement.




*) The spring in there was salvaged from the prior front cable and cut to length. It's necessary to get the foot pedal to return. Lokar's pedals have gas struts, so they don't care about that. But with this it works like the stock setup.

*) I ran the right rear cable through the brace that runs along the rear end tunnel. This used about 7' of the 8' cable, the edges aren't particularly sharp and the bends are acceptable.

*) I originally thought the springs in the rear cables were too long, so I trimmed them to match length of the springs on the Raybestos cables I pulled out. Well, those cables had different length springs. So I picked the longest. Still a mistake - the cable engaged the brake before hitting the spring. I ended up putting the spring trimmings back onto the cable. Lesson learned - don't trim those springs in normal 9" drum applications, even though they look hilariously long.

*) To adjust I just pulled the cables until I could feel the spring engaged, locked them down, then put on some shrink wrap to mark that location. Now I can tension the cables evenly.

*) The wound cables do fray very easily, so managing the cable after cutting, especially getting it into the front cable connector, was a bit of a bear.


So, what's the point?
In my case, the Raybestos front cable, less than two years old, had the rubber seal on the front collapse and the lining on the cable fray, leading it to hang up. I also never particularly liked the intermediate cable and balance bracket setup - always seemed like one side was under more tension than the other whenever I checked it.
The cables are high quality and the liner looks to be resilient, although the trimming and capping procedure isn't very robust.
Primarily I'm now set up to swap to rear disks with drum in hat parking brakes sometime in the near-ish future and Lokar has connectors for several different d-i-h levers.

cdrod

Hey Oddball:
Did you have to spec the lengths when you ordered the Lokar cables or is it a "trim-to-fit" deal? I already have drum-in-hat rear discs from a '01 Blazer but haven't quite figured out how I want to run the parking brake cables yet. I never liked the look or the functionality of the stock cables (just looped through the under-carriage). I really like that the Lokar cables are sheathed. Did you cross the RH cable over the driveshaft and run it down the LH side of the car? Where did you buy and how much? Thanks!

Rodney

oddball

They're universal trim-to-fit parts - just check out the part numbers I called out. Those had the black plastic sheaths. You can also get SS. There are different rear cable kit part numbers - they're all identical, except for the connectors for the different drum-in-hat levers. So you can get the specific kit, or get the no-connector kit I used and add the connectors. Just make sure to throw away the springs on the rear cables. They're useless for drum-in-hat units, and those cable kits don't come with them.

There's a floor reinforcement channel that runs over the drive axle. I ran the cable inside that channel to get to the left side, then brought forward. Almost like it was made for it! So from the drum it comes forward to the stock cable mounting hole, then into the floor brace, over to the other side, out on the left end, and forward about a foot and a half to my mounting bracket.

I just bought from Amazon. They're available at the usual speed shop places too.