Rear Brakes Finished

Hello again, I finally was able to finish the rear brake debacle today. What an adventure to install Ford rear disc brakes.

This is the hardware for the centre mount parking brake lever. Please ignore the hardware in the upper left hand corner, that's the beginnings of the body mount hardware. The spring on the rack is the parking brake main return spring. That's how I sandblast and powder coat the springs.

I use the same fixture to also mount the hood hinge springs I just use the end hole in the pipe with the bolt for the longer spring.

The rope makes loading and unloading stiff springs a breeze.

I mounted the new parking brake cables into the frame.

Then bolted the transmission cross member, assembled the parking brake lever and attached the parking brake cables.

Now the determination of whether or not the backing plates are best placed like this or switch from L & R and inverted. At first this arrangement seemed like the best possible chance to work.

But the cable casing is just too long.

Yup too long. With that I took apart the axle again and switched the backing plates from left to right and rotated 180˚. Now the parking brake cable enters from the top and uses more cable length. Which turned out to be a much better fit than this.

As for my last mistake of using Panther calipers that had one side with the bleed screw on the bottom, I bought Exploder, errr Explorer calipers that have an actual L & R side.

After cleaning and powder coating the Explorer calipers I went to install them on the chassis and I couldn't get the pads to go over the rotor. It was as if the Panther rotor was a hair to thick. At first I thought I was doing something wrong why would a rotor be ever so slightly different.

Well I turned to Rock Auto since they often list the specifications for parts and good grief the Explorer rotor is 0.075" thinner than the Panther, but otherwise dimensionally the same.

I wanted to be done with this so I just bought them locally.

Twice the price but I can install these.

Give me strength FORD... You really had to make TWO different parts with this tiny difference?! Talk about mismanagement. This is something I would expect from GM. But this is what was needed the calipers with fresh pads slid over them.

Round 2 of new rotors.

But FORD wasn't done with me yet. I installed the caliper and went to attach the banjo bolt for the brake hose and it's not threading. The 2000 Panther uses a 3/8 coarse banjo bolt and the 2000 Explorer uses a 3/8 fine thread banjo bolt.

This is lunacy.

A 2000 Ford with SAE/English hardware when everything else is metric. I stopped trying to figure this out. But the caliper was attached once more.

Next was to make reusable hooks that would attach to the parking brake cable and latch onto the parking brake lever. That spring is the original spring that came on the cables meant for drum brakes.

So I made these. They are nothing fancy, just 1/2" rod 304 stainless for the main body and 1/4" 304 rod to make the loop and then two 1/4-20 set screws to secure the cable to them.

I need to think about repairs in the future since this is going to be a daily driver. If I need to replace the parking brake cables for any reason these can be unscrewed and used on the new cable(s).

I powder coated the original cable clamps and installed them in the same fashion to secure the parking brake cable to the lower control arms.

So now you can see the parking brake cable (inner piece) is too long and needs to be cut and the spring reduced in size as well.

Continued in next post.