I believe I have finished fabricating the assembly. I'm going to source some new springs, but I think it's done.


The main pivot point got a brass washer installed to align the brackets and racheting mechanism. The washer is brass so it is able to wear down against the steel parts.


The same thing was applied to the smaller shoylder bolt that holds the ratcheting arm.


You can see here the relationship between the ratcheting arm and the teeth are lined up.


Heres how I have it before the top bracket is placed. I tried the washers under but tharts were rubbing.


Everything lines up perfectly.


Here is the hardware I used. Everything was sourced from ACE Hardware. I will get a full description of the sizes and measurements later. I could have pressed out the bottom of the main pivot point rivet, but I ended up drilling and tapping it; that is why there is only one nut.

From here, I need to degrease, paint, regrease, and reassemble the mechanism. The electronics is already done so all I have to do after final assembly, is drill two holes in the footwell and install rivnuts. After the assembly is installed, I can finally button up the other electronics down there and install the trim.

There's not much left to do to get this in place, but I still need to finish the center console, and install a new emergency brake cable.

If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

 

With it not being completely plug and play, there are a few unknowns. Let's see how they pan out.


Drivers side fender was removed for work on the two extra bolt locations. After 6 months, the 97+ windshield washer swap is still looking good.


The one bolt from the factory was backed out from the inside and placed back in from the outside.


I did this so I could hang the bracket off of it. Anyone whos ever tried to get this bolt out will tell you it is horribly placed.


The rear bolt for the hood release bracket may interfere with the assembly.


Behind the brake assembly are these two bolts protruding that hold onto the wiring harnesses. Because these are most likely going to move around some, I probably wont miss them if i have to grind them off.

Pretty soon I'm hoping to get the two holes drilled!

 

I had some downtime today during the transfer case swap, thought I could devote some time to the parking brake. Hopefully I'll have the Jeep up and running again sometime soon.


The two wire harness mounts caused some interference.


Trimmed!


This is roughly how it sits.

The top of the main bracket is not parallel with the ground; it angles down towards the rear axle slightly because the hood release is there. Is this how the police packages and MJ's sit? I am sure it wont cause a problem woth the release cable, just wondering if this proper.

 

Alright so just to preface, I jacked it up. Let's see how I attempted to fix it.


I marked out the holes on the inside and drilled a pilot hole. You can see I drew about where the top hole will land and the part that will need cut off to make it easier.


With the inner fender notched, you can see it better. Immediately I wondered if these prepunched holes are specifically for what I am doing. I seriously considered drilling out these holes instead. But that means ai would have to trim my hood release, something I seriously did not want to do.


So this is where I jacked it up. I drilled the top hole for the largest blind rivet I had knowing damn well the set I had was an assortment set from amazon, and I did not have to attachment for. The bottom blind rivet is the largest one that I actually have the attachment for.


To temporarily remedy my problem, I put one in the main bracket as an achor point.


Because I cannot put it on the jeep this will have to do for now.


A closer view of it sitting in there.

So this will have to work for now. There are some pros and cons to my mistake. I did not want to take the fender off to do any servicing but as of right now I'll have to take bolts out from both sides. In a perfect world, I would just have nuts welded on just like the factory one, but I currently do not own a welder and im in the middle of a transfer case swap.

I may actually swap the bottom one around. The reason being is the factory bolt next to the fuse block is completely terrible placement. So instead I may put a blind rivet in all three spots and run bolts from the outside.

Either way, this is the best I can do with the tools I have at the moment.

 

I measured the distance between the parking brake assembly and the splitter bracket to the rear lines and I got about 65 inches (with a little added length for good measure)

I doubt I'll be able to get the police package cable from the auto parts store. Does anyone one here have any insight on what cable I can use as a replacement? Thanks in advance.

 

Sorry for not posting in a bit. I got nearly everything how I wanted, and painted 😁

 

Got around to finishing the OEM hand brake 3D printed patch panel. If your curious about the rest if the center console, that thread can be read here 😁

https://www.cherokeeforum.com/f58/co...erhaul-270158/

 

MJ cable came in today. It's the front cable for a short bed. It is longer than needed, but since both ends mount and the cable just moves inside the sheath, I can deal with some slack. (Part number in pictures)





I didn't want to try to custom order one and have to pay an arm and a leg just for it to be wrong, so I got a real MJ one. Last thing to figure out is the rear mount.

 

Nearly done! I'm on the home stretch!

So after painting, I greased it, and assembled it. While putting it together I went to attach the brake switch. I remembered that when I extended the switch, I only had to do one wire, not two. This tells me that it grounds out to the body.

Sooooo I took it apart again and wiped off all of the grease, since I think it would complicate the ground. I also had to sand parts of the paint where it bolts to the body on both sides. Now that I'm thinking about it, I could grease it with dielectric grease! 😁😁 I'm so smart.

With that being said, I'm going to pick some up when I'm confident it's going to be the last time assembling. While I'm at the parts store, I'm going to get new springs. They work okay, but not great, and I really want to tighten both pivoting shoulder bolts more.



And now that I'm looking at the picture, I have to sand back the paint on the upper bracket for the top left bolt. I'll do that when I grease it.

So besides these things, the only things left are to figure out how I'm going to run this under my expanded capacity center console and to make a bracket that holds the rear clip on the front brake cable. And then we're done 😁😁😁 It's been a long time coming!

 

So while removing the hand brake, I snapped one of the bolts.


Peep the 242JHD swap


Broke the head right off. This is what I was left

So I drilled it out to 15/64 and tapped it with M7x1.0 because it was the next size up on my drill and tap chart and because I wanted to salvage as much of the welded nut as possible. And also because metric is superior; fight me.



And the plastic trim panel fits back into place. Just need to buy new bolts to fit the new threads.

This is obviously where I'm going to run the cable. Just need to create a bracket that holds the line in place and clean up the OEM equalizer bracket.

 

So I believe in the MJ's, the parking brake assembly mounting nuts are welded to the body, on the inside of the fender. I really wanted to go this route, but because I don't own a welder, I tried rivnuts.

That was a fail because I drilled the holes to match the size of the holes in the parking brake, and then realised I didn't have a rivnut that large.

After many therapeutic hours laying on my back in the foot well, I realised I did not want the bolts going through the parking brake and into the fender, but rather through the fender and into the parking brake. I would much rather take the fender off than to try to get up in the footwell again.

Since I don't own a welder, attaching the nuts to the parking brake was a challenge that I'm too embarrassed to say how long it took and how unhappy I am with the asthetics of it. But I did what i could woth my spot welder. They're no where near as strong or as pretty as I would like them to be, but anyways, here's my progress.



This is the front and back of the lower nut.



Front and back of the upper nut attached to the smaller bracket. The bolt passes through the main bracket.


I tried to spot weld this nut also but I couldn't get it centered properly. The other two bolts have some wiggle room in the fender, but this one had to be precise. I put the bolt in and JB Welded around the nut. This will eventually get 100% infilled; I ran out of JB Weld.



Here are two shots of it assembled.

I feel much better about the assembly, even if it looks horrendous. I will eventually fill the rest of that void in with JBWeld, clean up all the work, and repaint. Once this assembly is done, I can finally install the front cable and figure out the rear bracket. 😁

 

Finally opened up the cable and got it 3/4 the way installed.


​​​​I put the OEM XJ rubber boot onto to the MJ cable.


Got it slid back into place.


This is about where the rear connector wil lay in relevance to the parking brake assembly. I wont know for sure where exactly to posistion this end until I get the parking brake finished and connected to the other end of the cable.


As of right now, this looks about how much of the cables will overlap. It may look short, but the equalizer bracket mounts further up, right about in the middle.

 

Finally got everything how I wanted it with the assembly, and was able to get it installed. I really never want to get in there again; it was very therapeutic for my back.


Something I found out while trying to install whas the MJ switch wouldnt fit into the the XJ connector. I tried using the XJ switch but it routed the wire straight into the assembly and pinched the wire. There was this lip thats punched out to retain the MJ connector and i pressed it back into place and it fit no problems. The XJ one has a hole drilled in it for the connector to fall into. Oh well, it works.


Got it installed! I was able to run the bolts from outside the fender into the welded nuts. You can see here I also did some wire management.


The cover took a little massaging but I got it in place. The foot pedal scatched the fresh paint a little, but at this point in the mod, im okay with it. Maybe I'll respray it when I get stiffer springs in the assembly.

Final thing on the list is to make a bracket that holds onto the other end of the cable. We're nearly there!

P.S. I was going to grease it to keep it operating smooth and to prevent unnecessary wear, but the brake switch grounds out to the body. I had bought some dielectric grease and right before I put it on, I asked myself how does dielectric grease work on connectors without shorting out all of the pins??? Then it occurred to me that dielectric grease may not be conductive! Sure enough, it ain't. I litterly don't know what the difference between it and regular grease.

 

Didn't turn out exactly how I would have liked it, but it works. If I ever decide to do it again, it's easy to redo, I just want this endless mod to be over 🤣


I took the platic XJ adapter and made a CAD (cardboard aided design) and make a metal bracket and new seal


The hole isnt centered and I didn't have a 14mm drill bit so it's a little wierd



Better photo of how jacked up it turned out


Ran it through like normal and bolted it all together


Finished product!




I wanted to reuse the dust cover boot but I used the provision for the cable clip. Last thing for the whole swap is the equalizer bracket which is soaking in rust remover

 

It's finally finished! The entire assembly is installed and functional.



I tried to clean the stock equalizer bracket but figured for the price I could just buy a new and be happy with the reliability and safety of it. Threw it together with a washer and nut.

Now that the actual brake pedal assembly and cable are all installed and working, I can direct my attention to the center console. And if I haven't mentioned it before, here's the link for the complete center console overhaul:

https://www.cherokeeforum.com/f58/complete-center-console-overhaul-270158/