Handbrake frustrations

Ahh, the ever frustrating world of car restoration. A few posts back, I chronicled the very bad spray-paint job on the Handbrake. All the paint had to be scraped off, wiped down with paint thinner to get the sticky mess off. After stripping, I procrastinated quite a bit, which is usual for me after having poor results. Seen below in it's wet painted glory, it simply didn't dry.

Brake Handle

I had procrastinated enough, on looking at the original condition of the handbrake, I finally convinced myself that I wasn't doing worse than it was when I got it, so I proceeded on.

Original condition

I carefully painted on a coat of primer, let it dry for 24 hours, and then sprayed on a coat of black. After it was complete, I wasn't quite happy with it but I didn't want to tempt fate too much. You could still see the imperfections in the piece from before the paint job, but realistically, I let it go.

Pre-Installation

I wasn't very happy with the handle, so I wrapped it in rubber sealing tape. Used to seal communications connectors, over time it will somewhat collapse on itself and become one solid unit. We will see how well it turns over time.

Re-install

After fighting with it for over a hour and a half on the first attempt, I was ready to re-install. I had another hour planned to get it done. Once I arrived, I went to work. The connection to the brake cable took all of about two minutes. Surely, I would have trouble with the main connection... Three minutes later, I had the main connection made and the handbrake was installed and working.

View from Driver Side, up and down

View from passenger side, up and down

Extreme frustration! I had planned for at least an hour to get it back in place and it too all of five minutes. I was infuriated with myself for such poor time management and poor planning. I had left everything else to work on it at home. I walked around the car several times trying to wing something to work on and couldn't really find anything to so with the stuff I had on hand.

After a while, I decided to simply wipe down the entire car to take the layer of dust off the car and returned home. Once home, I dis-assembled the driver side door, like I had been planning to do for many weeks. This work will be covered on a future installment.