WWDiesel wrote:
Please post results of your repair, it may help some others.

Finally finished adjusting the parking brake mechanism between the front seats. The book says to remove the center console just to insert a punch into the brake handle mechanism -- I wasn't about to go through that nightmare. Instead, I accepted WWDiesel's recollection of doing it through the cubby hole compartment in the back of the console. After a two day process, I did manage to figure out the 5-minute method. See below for a series of pictures...
To access the parking brake mechanism, remove the cubby hole compartment. It's only 4 small screws in the bottom of the compartment. This is the view you get which includes the heater & air conditioning duct work to the back seat. Of course Chrysler put it exactly right in the way.

The easy part is heating a 2" wide putty knife with a propane torch to cut (melt) through the HVAC ducting. After heating the knife for 2 minutes, it only took 10 seconds to cut through the ABS ducting.

My first attempt at making a spacer was to use a ready-made 1/4" long x 1/8" inside diameter aluminum spacer. That failed when I cut the spacer then attempted to spread the opening to fit over the cable. It simply broke in half.
So, Act II. I discovered a malleable cable splice for 1/8" cable. It turned out to be the perfect stock to carve into spacers.

Marked it off by guessing the distances for a 1/16" spacer, 1/8" spacer, 3/16" spacer, and 1/4" spacer. Also marked off the bottom of the splice for the purpose of slipping the correct spacer over the cable.

Using a small bench vice, I gently cut the splice into sections but did not cut all the way though. Then turned it up endwise in the vice and cut the bottom off the splice.

These are the pieces I got out on one cable splice. It provided a roughly 1/16", 1/8", 3/16 and 1/4" spacers. I did find that trimming a taper in the open ends of the larger spacers allowed for getting them into place on the parking brake cable.

My first attempt to release the tension on the brake cables was to jam a chunk of Unistrut behind the (Oxen) yoke to give me space to work. That was a pain the the A... ...Donkey. It kept slipping out and making expletives fly around inside the Jeep interior. There has to be a better way.


Suddenly, the sky opened up and a light shined on this old dog. The answer was to cut the hook-part off the Unistrut out and use them as spacers on the two brake cables.

These 2" sections of the sides of the Unistrut simply dropped over top of the brake cables and stopped the Oxen yoke, providing a lot of room to slip a spacer of the parking brake cable.

Sorry, this is a little difficult to see in this picture.

It was easy now to slip any size spacer you need. Although this picture shows the 1/8" spacer, I actually used the 1/4" spacer. If necessary, you could put multiple spacers on the parking brake cable.

These are the tools I used to figure out how to turn a 2-day job into a 5-minute job without using hardly any tools. Ha ha.

Just to close out this posting, here is a picture of the ducting taped back together and a plastic pop rivet to secure the end of it.
