Making Brake cables for a Car.

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Anzaniste:
http://www.speedycables.com/ offer excellent service.

Silver soldering will have, as awmawson suggests have annealed the wire. Alternatively, if you rapidly cooled the joint you will have embrittled it. Either course of action is fatal to the high carbon cold drawn steel wire that makes up a brake cable.

If you ever have to go down the route of terminating a cable using a non mechanical method then the end of the cable needs to be un ravelled for a very short distance and the resultant "brush" needs to be drawn into a conical cavity which can then be filled with low melting point metal such as soft solder.
With a small diameter cable tinning using a soldering iron rather than a flame is essential(a flame will inevitably anneal the odd single strand here and there)
Typically the depth of the conical cavity needs to be 5 times the cable diameter and the included angle of the cone would be around 15 degrees.
This is an over simplification of what is a method of cable termination that , for safety's sake needs to be tightly controlled.

As Lew says, got to an expert and pay.

ParCan:
Message understood :)

New cables are not available so I will go to Speedy Cables and get some custom made.

Looking at the rest of the joints, I can see that they have all thinned so have definitely annealed the steel wire.

Thanks everyone for your help.

krv3000:
hi well as a ex car nut ther is several ways to do this yes you can soft solder them but you need to mack a taper in the sleve and a taper pin put the cabel thruw the nipel and put the pin in the midel of the cabel and hamer the pin in ones in then solder up or you can get boddon cabel crimpers larger vershons of wat you use for crimping your electrics on your car with i dont use brass as nipels i gust yous steel the other metherd is to cast the ends on i have seen it dun but have never dun it my self

doubleboost:
We used to make up motor cycle brake cables
A large copper iron was used with "tinmans"solder
Soft solder with a high tin content
The same method was used to finish the termination on winding cables in coal mines
Wire rope terminations use a resin now instead of solder

All parking brake cables that I have seen have crimped ends
John

ParCan:
5 X 1 KG of Frys tinmans solder arrived today from the Lab at work.
It's stamped 20660 so I think it's the correct stuff.
Cheep solder pot also arrived C/O Ebay.

Need some flux, was planning on Plumbers flux.
The white paste stuff is available cheaply everywhere so that's what I'll go for.

Same procedure as before. Put the nipple over the cable.
Un twist the wire for a few mm then clamp the cable and peen the ends into the recess made by the centre drill.
The plan is to dip solder the ends on using the solder pot.

Depending on time I may well attempt a video....

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