Fixing the parking brake lever

Specific conversations and info for the BMW E28 M5 and M535i.
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Randomg
Posts: 480
Joined: Jul 12, 2007 3:12 PM
Location: Seattle

Fixing the parking brake lever

Post by Randomg »

Decided to tackle this one finally, parking brake lever has been loose since I got the car in 2004 with 145k miles. Looked through the forum and didn't see much except suggesting to fix it with welding, glue, or rivets without much detail beyond that.

Removing the lever itself clarified that the bracket it sits on is supposed to be mounted from the bottom. I always thought it was supposed to be mounted from the top because when it's broken, the top sheet metal is what holds it in place. The metal along the top doesn't have any good place to mount to the bracket, unfortunately I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how to mount it to the top before realizing that it should mount from the bottom.

With the lever removed, I was able to move the bracket around enough to see 3 holes, placed at the corners of the bracket. I assume these were the original holes used to weld it. Using a small knife or pick, I pushed through the center of each of the three holes looked from below. From under the car I could see that the front left and right holes are right above the driveshaft csb, and the rear one is covered by the rear exhaust heat shield. There is a 4th hole for the last corner of the bracket that I couldn't get to from above, but was able to find it by poking around from below where it looked like it should be.

My initial plan was to use jbweld and rivets, jbweld to help with securing it against the backward pull from the cables, rivets to secure it when being pulled up. I managed to get it to stick with jbweld even though the angle is pretty tough. This allowed me to drill through the 4 holes from below so that there was a matching hole I could rivet through for each corner of the bracket.

I chose rivets initially because I was worried about space from underneath. You could get away with bolts at the front corners above the csb, however it turns out once the bracket is in place, you don't have enough room to get a nut on from above, so I think rivets are the only way to go.

The bracket doesn't sit flush against the frame, so my first rivet pulled the bracket loose from the glue. Luckily I had already drilled my holes so I didn't need a helper to hold it from above.

So far so good, it's held the car on a hill, and the center trim finally sits in the right place. If I could do it again, I'd try to progressively tighten the rivets to try to keep the glue from breaking loose, and add two more rivets in the center on each side for some extra support.
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