What Should You Never Do......

 ....just before a trip?

Take the car apart of course!

The handbrake on the Stylus has always been PANTS. This I feel is to do with the disc conversion on the back. I have no idea why people do it, the drums are far superior, but there you go. In my efforts to improve it I've been making it easier for the cable to move, first by taking out a really short balance bar, that really wasn't doing anything, whichever brake came on first took all the tension, so I put in a long cable from wheel to wheel & put a pulley in the middle to balance the tension.

That improved things, but the brake still wasn't good. Because the the lever works backward & forward rather than up & down, the cable passes downward from the lever, then round a pulley & back to the balance mechanism. My attention fell on that pulley - is was plastic & kind of soft. I suspect that when the lever was pulled the wheel deformed as the cable bit into the outside surface & the screwthread bit into the inner one. I looked through the Ebay "Aircraft Parts" section & found a small control cable pulley with a proper bearing in the middle & dismantled the plastic one.

The pulley was indeed soft plastic, PTFE or similar with a 10mm hole over a 1/4" cheap (& bent) screw, two nuts to stop it being clamped, then another nut holding it all to the chassis. It worked but "free running" it was not. I've assembled the new pulley & it seems much better, but when the car comes off the road for the winter upgrades, the mounting of the pulley will be something I look at. It may well need a couple of spacers turned up to keep everything in it's proper place.