Got a parking brake on your car? Betcha do. Does it work? Probably not, at least not real well. We’ll guess that upwards of half of the original-equipment parking brakes on older musclecars don’t work, either from broken or stretched cables, or because someone disconnected the whole mess and lost all the parts. We’ve never actually had to use an e-brake in a real emergency, and automatic trans cars seem to do alright without one, but it’s kind of hard to idle a manual trans car in neutral without a hand brake. We’ve tried, but it’s annoying to have to carry a brick in the back seat.
Surprisingly, however, the parking brake on our four-speed ’65 Biscayne actually did work after we adjusted out the slack in the old cables. But when we swapped in a new Currie 9-inch rearend (How To Build A Rearend ), we had a problem. We ordered the rearend with optional Ford Explorer disc brakes, which use cables completely different from the typical drum-brake–style spring-loaded cables the factory 10-bolt rearend used. What to do? Currie gave us the answer: Call Lokar Performance Products and get a set of its high-tech parking cables. We did and we were impressed at how effectively they solved an otherwise insurmountable problem.