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Handbrake Button Repair

6/18/00 -- I don't know what's taken me so long to get around to fixing the button on my handbrake, but in conversations with other early Spitfire owners, the problem I was having seems to be commonplace thanks to a painful design flaw in the original "fly-off" handbrake design. Round-tail Spitfires are all equipped with emergency brakes that are rather strange by modern standards: To engage the brake you must pull up on the handle while depressing the button with your thumb -- or at least depress the button when you reach an acceptable level of tightness to "set" the brake. To disengage, you merely pull the handbrake up another notch and it automatically releases the mechanism. Later Spitfires adopted the standard practice of using the button to release the handbrake -- not lock it into place.

The design flaw is that over time, the actuator rod that's connected to the set button actually wears a hole through the plastic, so that 1/8" or so of the metal rod protrudes from the end of the button, making for a rather painful experience whenever you need to set the handbrake for parking. I guess I let this go for so long because the problem was familiar to me and I didn't recognize it immediately as such. My original '67 Spitfire, nine years old when I bought it in '76, had the same problem. I think subconsciously, I just thought they were supposed to be this way for some strange reason. It's taken me 40 years, but I guess I'm finally developing some common sense. Setting the handbrake shouldn't wear a hole in your thumb...

I requested help from the Spitfire list members and a few suggested fabricating my own button "cap", which is exactly what I've done.

Rooting around in my toolbox, I found some odd shaped rubber washers or bushing of some sort, that almost have the perfect shape to them. They also have a small hole through them, which fits rather neatly over the protruding actuator rod.

I carefully held the washer in place with my vice, and using a rounded grinding stone and my die grinder, created an inverted convex shape to the underside of the washer, to mate with the rounded end of the stock button.

Once I had the size and shape I desired, it was just a matter of using some strong epoxy to bond the new attachment to the brake button. A solid surface for the tip would have been preferable, but at least now the actuator rod is no longer protruding from the button and into my thumb. The hole in the washer was filled with the epoxy.

Nikolaj Blomberg of Denmark wrote to say that he easily removed the punctured button on his Mk3 with a pair of pliers and fashioned a new button out of wood, drilling a small hole in the center just deep enough to pressure fit onto the actuator rod. Good idea!