Flickering handbrake light

[David's8]

I actually filed the remains of the narrow piece of plastic off the clip and the trim and used a piece of plastic as a support along the whole length of the clip to getit to the right height. I think that superglue and a tiny pin may be the answer. Not that I am getting obsessed at all.....

and thanks for keeping the back up trim to hand.

[HPsauce]

Originally Posted by HPsauce

As for the warning light I'm thinking about fitting a microswitch as part of the pad that the handbrake rests on when released, immediately behind the leather handle grip.

I've just had a bit of inspiration on this one.
There really isn't much room down there, and access is tricky without major dismantling which this doesn't justify.

From nowhere a thought entered my brain - magnetic reed switches, typically used on door alarms!
These are sealed passive devices, triggered by a magnet moving close to (or away from) the sensor and available in NC or NO varieties.
They can also be quite small; I have some in my house that are about an inch long and a few mm wide.
It should be easy to fit one onto the pad under the handbrake and stick a suitable magnet onto the handbrake lever. The circuit needs to be open when the handle is down and closed when the lever is pulled up, so an NC type is needed.

[HPsauce]

A bit of progress at last, proof of concept!
I bought a microswitch from China on eBay that has 3 wires so can be NC or NO. Tested it to see if it works and which wire is which (NO documentation!).
It's sort of cylindrical (*2) about an inch long, presumably designed to pop into drilled holes in wooden doors and frames, and works fine.

I fished at the car wiring and managed to get some string round it to pull it up, though it's fairly short so won't come up past the handbrake. Luckily it has standard 6.3mm spade (female) connectors so I managed to extend it with some short wires pre-terminated with male spade connectors that I pushed in using a variety of tools to hold, manipulate and push just beyond finger reach.

Then I connected the microswitch to the wiring and turned the ignition on. Handbrake warning light appears!
Move the magnet within about 1cm and the light goes out.

Now I just need to work out exactly how to mount it.
I think the switch will be bracketed onto the rubber stop below the handbrake and the magnet will go inside the plastic handbrake cover, so that when the handbrake is off it's close to the switch, but when pulled on is lifted away.

[HPsauce]

Job done, all working fine, handbrake warning light comes on at the first "click" position.

I made a small mounting plate out of thin fairly-rigid plastic - from the lid of a plastic takeaway food carton as it happens.
All I did was cut a small rectangle to fit under the handbrake stop (about twice as big) and made two suitably-located and sized holes in it, one for the locating peg of the stop, the other for the reed switch which just feeds in (leads first) from the top behind.
The switch just sort of hangs down behind the stop towards the passenger side of the slot; I needed to cut back very slightly (maybe 2mm) a bit of the trim edge under there so that it was snug and vertical. I also rounded off bits of the plate to keep it clear of the handbrake cover.
The reed switch needs to be pretty tight up against and behind the stop to be secure and not foul the handbrake or cover.

The plastic handbrake cover needed a bit of minor trimming (not visible) as on the inner passenger side there's a vertical return edge about 3" long and 3mm wide that catches/rubs on the plate and reed switch where they can't be trimmed.

The magnet slotted vertically into this cover, again after a bit of trimming with a hot knife so that it didn't protrude and jam against the metal handbrake lever. It's just a small magnet inside a lump of plastic so no issues doing that.

I fitted the magnet with blu-tak so that it could be moved, but didn't even need to adjust it. I had checked the operating range beforehand so had a good idea where it needed to go. If it's still good after a few journeys I'll reattach it with something a bit more permanent.

[HPsauce]

Just to say that after nearly 2 months it's still working perfectly.