The XS Triple Sidecar - Sidecar brake (part 5)

Kudos to you, if you're still following this story, I've read Shakespeare plays that consisted of fewer acts.

Either way, the last part of the sidecar brake was the actuation or more down to Earth: The brakepump. Now I could have gone the easy way and hooked the sidecar brake up via the rear brake pump and called it a day. BUT every time I want to get my sidecar inside the shop, I'd have to take the brakeline off, which would then mean bleeding brakes etc. 

When I bought the 850 engine, I also picked up some other parts, including a complete rear brake assembly with the goal of mirroring the standard rear brake of the bike.

This is essentially the first mockup in order to see whether both brake levers would sit on the same heigth (nope) and whether there would be enough room to have them sit side by side.

Some fooling around with the stock return spring, which in the end I didn't use, because it caused too much headache in the shape of parts that would have had to be fabricated. 

More mockups...

I've made a little jig to make all the brackets and clamps roughly the same and it came in handy again, when making the big clamp, which was to become the base for the brake pump. 

You know sh*t is serious, when Mama "B" comes out to play... (Seriously, this thing is somewhere around 10kg and is an easy going 2.2kW of power (and that's not what's going in, but what it's rated at the spindle...)

You know you have something close to a nice fit, when it just clamps to the tube without bolts.

The (unnecessarily) modified brake-lever spindle.

Another mockup of how this is supposed to go together

Less mockup, more almost finished.

 Spot the spring. These can be had for around 3 Euros at my DIY-store the amount of headscratching it saved me from: priceless.

It's not overly impressive (and the video's a bit shaky), but it snaps back beautifully.

 And that's the finished product. If you look very, very closely you can see a hole in the right brake lever and that's where the connecting bracket will go in to link both brakes. (For legal reasons.)