Experiencing a flickering handbrake light on your MGF? In the USA this is the emergency brake. Read on for how to deal with this. This is another article from Mark Jones the North American MGB Register’s Post Abingdon registrar.
Background #
This past spring, the brake light started flickering on the dash of my wife’s MGF. The brake light serves two purposes. It indicates low fluid level in the brake master cylinder. Also, it indicates when the parking brake is engaged. When my wife mentioned the brake light was flicking, I first checked the level of the brake fluid. The fluid level was okay, it had not dropped.
The Solution #
On checking the handbrake lever it had a bit of upward movement when not engaging. This indicated to me think that the lever to cable connection needed tightening a bit. The handbrake adjusting nut is located under the stowage bin in the centre console armrest.
Access is not bad. In order to be able to turn the nut, a ratcheting wrench makes adjusting the nut fairly easy. Of course, the DPO (Dreaded Previous Owner) had been into this part of the car. I discovered that the threaded rod from the handbrake was not going through the handbrake equaliser pin. Also, the adjusting nut was tight up against the handbrake cable equaliser. This made it impossible to adjust the handbrake mechanism. This DPO botch took a bit of time to fix (finagling the threaded rod through the equaliser pin) with the only access through the stowage bin. This ultimately requires a new adjusting nut.
Making Adjustments #
The procedure for adjusting the hand is to turn the adjusting nut until the caliper lever clearance is between 1 and 2 mm each side. I used a wire feeler gauge to judge the width of the clearance.
It was at this point that I discovered that the right rear caliper’s handbrake mechanism was seized. A week later, a pair of rebuilt rear brake calipers arrived from the UK and were installed (I plan to rebuild the calipers that came off this winter).
With new rear calipers installed, it was back to adjusting the handbrake mechanism. It’s not hard to adjust the handbrake but it does involve multiple steps. Tightening the adjuster nut. Getting under the car to measure the caliper lever clearance on both calipers. Then getting back into the car to tighten or loosen the adjusting nut. Then back under the car, etc., etc. for as many cycles as necessary. With the rebuilt rear brake calipers and a properly assembled and adjusted handbrake mechanism there is now no flickering brake light on the dash, success!
Other Materials #
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