Thank you Frank, Earl, and others who helped pioneer the whole Explorer rear disc thing. I'd been wanting to do this for a while, got the parts together some time back, but I've been putting it off because I wanted to do it all at once and I didn't quite know what the heck I was gonna do about the parking brake. My car's a daily driver and I knew if I did the conversion now and decided to do the ebrake later it would not get done any time soon. I looked at Explorer cables, thought about modding the Maverick cables, got under a few cars at Pull-A-Part looking for inspiration. It never did come to me. So Friday my rear brakes start squeaking. I had just detailed the car, was feeling great about it, and then comes that awful sound at every red light. I decided no way was I gonna buy new shoes for the drum brakes. Screw that. Friday night I got my parts together, jacked up the car and tore into it. I stared at the cable and thought for at least an hour. I started making a little adapter plate and wasn't satisfied with it. Finally, after about 3 hours the solution came to me and it was so simple I'm ashamed. A picture's worth a thousand words, so just take a look at it here. That's a tiny little u-bolt from Lowe's. "1/8" Wire Rope Clip" they call it. Fits like it was made for it... I wanted to avoid making any mods whatsoever to the Explorer parts, the idea being that future maintenance might be simpler that way. We'll see. But I did make a few changes to the car. On the passenger side, I had to trim the bottom of the backing plate on the axle tube so the bracket would sit flush. As you can see in the pic, I cut off the retaining clips on the brake cables so they'd fit the Explorer brackets, and so that I could get the end of the cable closer to the hook I attached it to. I also cut about 3/4" off the spring on the cable end so that I could get more travel out of it. Once that was done I adjusted the nut on the equalizer lever under the floor, and found that in order to get the ebrake nice and strong, I would have to give it more preload than I felt comfortable with. So I drilled another hole 1/2" further up the lever and moved the threaded shaft from the original hole into that one. This gave me more travel with less preload. At this point the brake handle felt like it had the right amount of resistance, and the parking brake held the car as tight as ever. One thing I did not have to do was clock the holes in the brackets. My lowering blocks made the leaf spring interference a non issue. Frank's description of "it just sits down in the road" is an apt one. The brakes feel perfect. Today was weird. Usually I get my kicks from stomping the other pedal!
Looks great! Cool e-brake mod - thanks for posting that! Someday I may just get around to doing this as well.
How do you adjust those? I did this setup on my conversion and have only been tightening the cable... should I also try to tighten the shoes? dumb question I'm sure just don't want them to drag
Not a dumb question. I don't recall having to adjust the shoes, only the cable. But it can be done...
there is a star adjuster wheel just like on regular drum brakes that you can adjust the explorer parking brake with. you want to adjust it out to where the rotor is just able to slip over the parking brake shoe. you want the cable to be just tight enough to where the levers on the back side of the backing plate will move if you go any tighter.
Typically any shoe type ebrake I have seen is adjusted at the shoes. The vehicles dont have a cable adjustment like ours do. Adjust the shoes up till snug and dragging then back off until rotor spins freely with no drag on shoes. It can be tricky to set the shoes up on a rear wheel drive especially a trac loc. I like to do it with a nice clean ebrake surface on the rotor so I can adjust the shoes till the rotor just slides over easily on install. Its easier this way then trying to adjust the shoes when assembled. You dont want any drag on those shoes.
