Thread: Project Sebring GT Spyder

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Mike, so sorry for you and your family's loss. I wish you all the best coping with it. At least you had your Grandfather and father to teach you those lessons. It is mind boggling ho many kids these days have nobody to teach them anything outside of school.

Ok folks. It's been a few months and I really should get back on this project in earnest. Mom is doing fine and we have just about everything done that needed to be. I have some updates that were being edited before dad passed as well as some on the progress I made when I could get time or felt like it. I will work on getting them up over the next few days.

After the driveshaft loops, I decided to move on to mounting the E-brake handle. This one is from a Mazda Miata and it fits like it was made for this car. All it needs is a flat vertical surface and three 5/16"(12mm?) bolts. This one went in easy with three 5/16” rivet nuts.

I know a lot of you are thinking that it is mounted too high, but it actually is out of the way mounted like this. It clears my leg and falls right to hand. Any lower and my leg would have been constantly poked by the end of the handle. I could always use it to do some drifting or handbrake J turns!!!! If it does turn out to be in the way, it can easily be rotated down by drilling more holes.

Getting the handle mounted was the easy part. I bought a Lokar E-brake cable kit and running those turned out to be more complicated that I had anticipated.

I had a short Mazda cable that fit the handle, but could only use the front part. I welded a Lokar cable end from an old kit I had from another project to the swiveling adjuster in the new kit. This allowed me to use part of the Mazda cable with the new kit. The Lokar adjuster will be used to get the initial slack out of the cables, while the Mazda handle has an adjuster built in that can be used to adjust for any future cable stretch. The Mazda adjuster can be accessed from the top of the handle making it much easier to get to than the Lokar one, too.







With the top side stuff done, it was time to get the cables actually ran to the calipers. That's where the real work started.

When I built the rear caliper mounts, I had to swap sides with the calipers to clear the air bag mounts and this put the cables exiting to the rear of the car. The wheels are wide and also have some positive offset and this put the calipers deep into the wheel, so the cables had to make a curve to get out. The cables had to stay clear of the Watts link, too.

I spent quite awhile under the car mocking up various cable runs, but I didn't like any of them. They all involved big floppy loops of cable that came close to the exhaust or rubbed on the gas tank or both. They all looked like the E-brake was an afterthought (which I guess technically it is).

I finally decided that there was no easy path to follow. In order to make things work without interfering with anything else, I was going to have to make some parts to guide and hold the cables where I needed them to go.

I started with some standoffs that clamped around the cables and bolted to the Watts link mounts on the frame. These allowed me to put just the right curve in the cables to keep them from rubbing on the wheels.







I had to make a third one of these to route the cable out of the way of the Watts link rocker. Sorry, it's hard to see in this picture what is actually going on.

This brought both cables more or less together just to the left of the rearend center section. They had to pass under the rearend and I carved out an aluminum bracket to hold them in place. The tape is there just to mark the location.







The last piece was a block to bolt to the rear bulkhead to keep the cables off of the driveshaft and exhaust.



After everything was built, I had to spend a good morning jacking the rearend through it's travel and fiddling with cable position to find the best compromise.

Here is the finished topside setup.



After getting a preliminary adjustment on the cables, everything worked as it should. The wheels would lock against hand turning with a couple of clicks on the handle. I didn't get too rough with it, though, since i didn't want to tighten the cable ends and deform the Lokar cables too much. Everything has to come back out and getting the cutoff Lokar cables back into the adjuster block will be hard enough without them being frayed from a lot of tightening. For now though, it's proven itself well enough.

Crikey!
I'm impressed!
That's very ingenious; and there's obviously been a tremendous amount of head-scratching and whatifs went in to it.
Top marks that man!

"......I finally decided that there was no easy path to follow......"

Don't you hate it when that happens.

Very nice engineering on getting them routed.


.

Great attention to detail, looks like a lot of work went into that.

That's some clean, creative engineering there. Nice!

Wow, very awesome pieces you made to guide and mount the cables! I know your pain on the cutting the cables and dealing with them fraying etc. Have you tried to tin them with soldier after cutting them? I've done that to help aid in not removing skin during working on the vehicle later. Sometimes the SS cable won't take it very well though.

Interesting and a great solution to the problem. Great Job!

Very nice work on the cables, I need to do something for Rita this winter. Every time I step on the brakes I can't help but think

" If something blows, I'm going to be busy "

Thanks guys. It feels good to get back to work on the car. I don't think I can get it driveable before the end if the year as I had hoped, but maybe early next year (fingers crossed).

40, I have not tried tinning the cables, but that is a good idea. I will give it a try.

I wish ya luck on getting it running before the white crap ruins your fun. Same boat I'm in sort of.

Man, I can't believe how time gets away from me. My last update was in the first part of September and here it is nearly Christmas. Along the way I've been to a car show in Tunica Mississippi, a British car show locally and spent a few days at Cruizin' the Coast down Biloxi way.

You know what they say about all work and no play!

Here are a few pics I took.





This was a way cool slingshot dragster that was at Tunica. Wish I could post a video of it running. It sounded fantastic! I've got to get to a cackle fest one day.



This is a Pontiac overhead cam six that was in a LeMans. You don't see many of these old engines. Also at Tunica.



A 4 cylinder Cummins diesel with turbocharger in a patina '53 Chevy pickup. It was a very clean install with a Ford 5-speed manual. The owner claimed 30 MPG at interstate speed with the air on. I could get into a build like this for a long distance cruiser.





At first glance, this looks like just another LS in an early Chevy truck. What I found interesting was that the builder hid the coils under the tall sheet metal intake. I thought it was slick way to clean up the top of an LS.



These are some friends from Missouri that we met in Tunica 3 years ago and we've been saving each other parking places ever since. They have a beautiful early 50's Chevy truck. We bring the grill and Cajun sausage; they bring the generator and fans and we tailgate. I think they hang out with us for the sausage!