Parking Brake Woes Park the Gray Ghost

Welcome back Gray Ghost fans!  It's been a couple of months since my last update and I've made some progress.  Although not as much progress as I would have liked.  The project that has had me tied up for so many months is installation of the park brake cables.  In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to do both the park brake cables and the brake shoe replacement all at the same time. I didn't have the cables back then and I just went for it on the brake shoes.  I always knew I'd have to take things apart once I got the cables.  I got the cables last Christmas, so back in January I got started.  Yes, you read that right.  January!  It is now Memorial Day weekend and I'm sad to report that I'm still not done!  I did make significant progress today, so I figured I'd give a status report.  It's sort of a tragic comedy.

Act 1

Getting things back apart in the drum was easy.  Disconnecting the park brake lever from the brake shoes was nothing more than removing a bolt.  Disconnecting the cable from the lever was relatively easy, too.  It was under spring tension, so a little persuasion was necessary.  Next came removing the cable backing plate from the brake housing backing plate.  Two screws to remove and off it came.  So far, so good!  Then came removing the cable from the cast iron bracket that is riveted to the frame. (Cue the dire sounding music now....)  This was not going to be easy.  The cable and bracket looked like this:

The silver lining in this cloud is that after soaking in Kroil for a very long time, the nut and bolt came apart!  That, is the only silver around here.  As you can see, the cable is rusted in place. Looking at the cable, the front of the truck is to the right.  The front part of the cable is where the clevis connects to the cable and then to the crossmember that activates the park brake when the pedal is depressed.

Long story short, I used wire cutters and cut the front part of the cable off and soaked the bracket cable in more Kroil and left for the week.  When I came back, I was able to use the ball pein hammer and a punch to get the rusted part of the cable out of the bracket.  Smooth sailing surely must be ahead now.

Well, not so much.  The first part of the installation was pretty straight forward.  Insert the brake drum end of the cable through the backer plate, add the felt washer and screw it in place.  Then attach the cable to the park brake lever.  The new cable and washer looked like this:

When I went to slide the new cable into the bracket I found that the ferrule on the new cable was just, ever so slightly, too big to fit into the bracket. Go figure.  I tried using a pry bar to open up the bracket, for which I was soundly chastised by my truck forum friends.  They reminded me that it is cast iron and doesn't take kindly to being pried.  I tried gently grinding some of the ferrule.  That didn't work either.  I tried getting my Dremel with a chainsaw sharpening grinder attached, but there wasn't enough room to fit the Dremel in place. The cable bracket needed to be adjusted, there was no doubt about that.  Here's what the cable/bracket looked like at this point:

Clearly it didn't fit.  But of an even greater problem is that without moving to the end of the bracket, the cable wasn't long enough to connect to the clevis and crossmember!  Here's how far apart they were:

So, I was left with a small rat tail file.  Laying on the creeper for over 2 hours and filing a little, then testing the fit and then repeating, I finally got the ferrule to fit into the bracket.  Even then, I had to lubricate the ferrule and bracket for it to go in.  Now, Gray Ghost fans, don't be fooled into thinking that this was a quick process.  Far from it.  The next pic shows the cable finally connected to the clevis and the crossmember.  This pic was taken in...April.  Anyway, here it is:

Here you can see the whole arrangement.  The bracket with the cable fully seated, the new grade 8 hardware cinching it down, the threaded rod end of the cable, 2 jam nuts, the clevis, clevis pin and cotter key.  The cotter key is just set in place, as I have to remove the clevis from the crossmember to adjust the brake shoes, but that is in the future, as I'm not ready yet.  I've still got the driver's side to do!  OMG!

Yeah, it is kind of a groundhog day type of thing.  I got into the driver's side brake drum, got it all apart, got the new cable installed and then the wheels came off the wagon.  Bigtime or Bigly if you like that.  The issue has to do with the "spreader bar" and the orientation of the spring that goes around it.  It looks like this:

OBTW, it is installed WRONG!  It took me days to figure out about how it had to be positioned. Couple that with a busy schedule and it took me another 2 weeks to get around to actually fixing it.

Intermission

Here's a fun shot of the 2 old clevis connectors and cables:

Act 2

Installation of the cable in the driver's side bracket...yes it takes the same trajectory as the passenger side.  Four hours later, it is in place.  Now,and only now, am I able to go back and adjust the brake shoes in each drum.  After that is done, there is an adjustment to the park brakes that I'll need to do. However, before I can do that, I need to figure out what the shop manual is trying to tell me about the process.  At the time of this writing, I have no clue.  Even though I've read it several times.

So here we are, 5 months into this process and I'd call it about 50% done.  Maybe less if I messed up the fluid pressure in the brake lines and they have to be bled again. Grand total of labor hours to get to the 50% point is pushing 40 hours.  Brothers and Sisters,  let us pray!