This is going to be an interesting set of posts taking you through how I fitted my electric handbrake. It’s not been an easy ride (ahem).
In this post, I debated the various options I was thinking about whilst wanting to move away from the conventional handbrake solutions for an actuator with control. I went for the Speedway Motors E-Stop kit and I must say, Speedway were a very efficient outfit to order from. Their international sales team were quick to confirm the international shipping rules with me, and it arrived 5 days later, which is excellent from the States. HM Customs then stuck me in the eye for £90 duty though. I wasn’t pleased about this.
Following is a 3 minute video they’ve done which shows how it fits and how it works. The only major difference between their video and my circumstances is that this shows the e-Stop kit working on a gert big american chassis, and I’m going to squeeze it into my tiny Fury.
How mutch does the kit weigh?
If you include the optional bracket for separating the cables (wot I bought) then it’s 2.3kg. I haven’t yet weighed the old handbrake and associated gubbins that are being thrown away. I’m hoping I get away with evens.
If it the actuator was a bit cheaper I might have considered it an option. It gives you many more options for packaging for example there is no need for it to be in the transmission tunnel.
I have to admit, I had to close my eyes when I hit “buy” an the taxman butt-fucking me with a cactus for the next £90 was also painful. I did have a long think about just buying an actuator and going with that, but the E-Stop has a control box which does most of the switching and is current sensing (apparently). I thought that having the whole lot controlled rather than having to work that out for myself was worth the sting.
From a packaging perspective, it’s totally brilliant though – right down low.
I suppose it depends on your electric and electronic knowledge skills – I know it’s just an actuator, with a simple microcontroller and a bit of code to manage current sensing. You could equally do it with an actuator that gives a positional feedback and calibrate it yourself – it only needs (at most) 50mm of travel. I did see actuators on ebay that could pull 600Nm for less than £100. I decided (for once) to at least go off the shelf to save some time.