Emergency brake hookup

[Glendale TroutmanSr]

This is for my son and his first Vair8 build. We are and looking for some help in the way of suggestions and photos(if avail) for a good procedure for hooking up the emergency brakes.

[VairKing]

Stock rear brakes? All you need is something to pull on the cable. The stock lever under the dash works fine, or like many, I mounted a lever out of a modern car between the front seats. Just used cable clamps to hook the cables together. If you have disk brakes on the rear you will have some engineering to do, although almost all disk brakes with built in parking brake use a cable actuation of some sort. If you have disk brakes with no provision for a parking brake, you will have to do like I am doing with my V6 car, and use some sort of a hydraulic lock to put pressure on the brake system to hold the car. There are 2 types of these, one that is simply a lock, you push the brake pedal and actuate the lock and it holds pressure on the system, the other, which I like more, is actually a 2nd master cylinder hooked to the parking brake lever that adds hydraulic pressure to the system when you pull the lever. NOTE: This is not an EMERGENCY brake, but instead a parking brake. They quit putting emergency brakes on cars years ago when they started to make the systems wimpier and wimpier. Now they call it a "Parking Brake" and it is only intended to hold the car once it is stopped. In a hydraulic failure, the latter style will not stop the car. I have found with new brake components everywhere this is not an issue for me. Next time you are out in your modern car try to stop it with the parking brake. Probably not going to be too effective.

[Tom Z]

about 5 years ago I helped Ron Butera "fix" the car he bought from the Detroit convention; drums all around,P-brake cable missing because it 'fouled' the mid-327..IIRC, we went with single RWD cables to brackets mounted up ahead further..Later disc setups have a puny drum brake setup "in" the rotors,worked by a cable..AFAIK most states won't allow the park/emergency brake to be "hydraulic"..

[Glendale TroutmanSr]

Thanks to both for the response. I had an idea and you just reinforced it. Keep pumping!