Emergency brake handle restoration

[rv6aflyer]

My '72 emergency brake handle was pretty beat up. I looked around a bit at buying a new one and then decided to try and fix my old one. The first picture is a severely cropped shot of the interior showing the brake handle before any work. The second picture shows the brake handle when I was done.

The process was fairly simple: Sand out all the bad stuff with 100 grit, than 220. Then smooth it further using ScothBrite (burgandy grade grit) finally polishing it with my polish wheel on my bench grinder. It's hard to get a good picture of a shiny black object, but I'm pretty pleased with the result.

[cygnusx1]

Wow that is really nice! When I run out of the other million things to do, I'll give it a shot. I suppose the plastic grip will not separate from the metal, to make it easier, will it?

[socal70Z]

Nice work, did you also paint it? looks perfect. Thanks for showing. Aaron

[esprist]

Plastic grip of the handle is very high quality, which hardly come apart. You can also paint it on the car if you mast it well with "mini paint booth" made out of a cardboard box.

You simply cover the area and paint around the handle.

[240260280z]

Beautiful work

[Patcon]

What type of polish did you use? What kind of wheel speeds with the polish? Did you have any problems burning the plastic while polishing?

Charles

[FastWoman]

VERY NICE!

FAIW, you can also compound and polish plastic just the same way as paint (and with the same products). If you think about it, paint nowadays IS plastic.

Edited June 22, 2011 by FastWoman

[rv6aflyer]

I used a 6" cotton polishing wheel (from Harbor Freight) on my bench grinder which turns at 3500 rpm. The polishing compound is the "Brown" compound also from Harbor Freight. I was a little worried about burning, but it didn't seem to be an issue at all. There was no paint involved, just sanding and polishing.

[TomoHawk]

Could you replace the plastic handle with something if you needed to? I haven't been to the JY lately, but it sounds reasonable if you could remove or cut the grip part off a JY car and put it on the Z.

The only other thing I can think of right now is to wrap the Z grip with leather or something, like twine.

This could be a good one for a tech article, with some more details and photos.

Edited June 22, 2011 by TomoHawk