Trailer Park Brake solved with pics (1 Viewer)

[smritte]

I decided to make this a separate post because of the trouble I had researching park brakes. I know people have successfully hooked them up but all I found after months of research was people asking about it, others trying things but never saying if it worked. Odds are the info is buried in someone’s build thread.

So here we go.

Handle. I chose an Orscheln Lever, Part number 02182700. The design is Called "Over Center" I found it for $19.00 on e-bay. Seems the average price on these is from $30-$60.

Cables. Control Cables inc. Parking Brake Cables | OEM replacement cables | Street Rod Parking Cables (562) 949-0455. These people rock. $100 shipped. Trying to piece this together from E-Trailer I was looking at almost $300. The cables would have been cut to fit and I would have had to figure out how to attach them to my backing plates.

They will ask you a ton of questions. I took a length of welding cable and draped it around to get my lengths. My backing plate tabs have a 9/16 hole. This seems to be standard. My dexter axle has a lever hanging down, 4” from the holder. They have all the parts no matter what configuration you have. I Ordered them Thursday night as they were closing and had them on Tuesday.

Now for the pictures

Here's what the ends look like. Heavy housing and cable. The housing has 2 grooves cut for different thickness of mounting tabs. The retainer is an E-Clip.

Equalizer and Adjuster

Looking down into the handle. You can see how well the clevis fits over the draw bar.

Handle mounted. The top of the handle threads to adjust how far the cable is pulled. I have mine set to about 2/3 of the slot.

Here's the attachment at the backing plate.

Sigh. Have to make a second post to get the other pic.

 

[smritte]

Last picture

Cable routing.

The cables are routed to when the axle moves, the cables won't bind or pull on the brake. You take the slack out of the cable at the equalizer then adjust the handle for the pull distance. After adjusting, I made sure the levers on the brakes went back completely.

The only things I had to make were the cable mount tab's under the body and in the handle. They were all 9/16 holes. They Had mounts at Control Cables but I didn't want to pay for nice stainless pieces.

 

[spressomon]

^ Nice post and thanks as I too would like to add a parking brake onto our Escape 15A.

 

[cruiserpilot]

Good thread, have thought about it for my trailer just never got to it

 

[greentruck]

Just what I was looking for. Getting ready to put a braked Dexter axle under our M101 CDN and was wondering how the parking brake hooked up.

 

[Chris Wilcox]

For the M101 CDN you can still get all oem parts including the cable.

 

[greentruck]

For the M101 CDN you can still get all oem parts including the cable.

I've got the OEM cables, but adapting them to work with the Dexter mounts is proving difficult. The sheath end doesn't really fit the fixed mount well, but can be made to work. I found a drive chain link that works as a clevis to hook up to the moving lever. I've been trying to retain the recoil spring that returns the brake lever to free, but now that I'm referring back to these pics I see where he used a cable without any return spring, so am thinking if I can get that off it might help make mounting things easier. The Dexter lever seems to have some sort of return spring internally, so the OEM spring wrapped around the cable may be superfluous.