Small thing but took long time

It is a bit hard to justify removing wiring harness as a precursor to rear end job. However, hand brake removal makes more sense. At least so at first. Frankly, the hand brake only has 2 cable connection and wiring harness has 2 ABS sensors ;). But who cares, I am here trying to postpone the heavy lifting of the rear axle. So hand brake comes first.

The hand brake is a no-brainer. Undo the handle nuts. Unhook the T connector. Fish the cable through the hole and put the thing on the shelf. Done! Well, there's still those two cables going from T connector to the actual calipers. Again, unhook the cables at the caliper end. Undo a couple of screws that hold the mounts to the unibody. Fish the cables out of the body pockets. And you should be almost done. The tricky part is that last bracket. You see, the other ends of the cables are snapped into a bracket that is welded to the unibody above the drive-shaft. The cables have a funny clip that holds them in the bracket. The clip is round with 3 barbs evenly spaced around. The challenge is to get all 3 barbs squeezed and push the clip out form the bracket. Due to the location of the bracket there's not much visibility of all 3 barbs. I was able to press at most two of them but one was always left out. The fact that the two ends are next to each other just reminded that there's twice as much frustration. I even used my creativity and strapped a hose clamp around the barbs but the clamp was not strong enough to squeeze the barbs too. So after a short while I gave up and decided that I need more "POWAA"!

Yep, I took the grinder to it. It did not help at all. So I had the bracket hanging on the cables. I could not see all the barbs but still did not lucky freeing the cables out. In fact, I gave up and moved on to the axle that day.

I came back to take the cables out about a week later. It's still in Canada and still November. But fear not because I got this:

I found I had that from long time ago stuffed with other junk I have never unpacked after the move. It's obvious that heater did nothing but thankfully we were still getting around 10 C degrees out here. In fact, the temperatures were starting to drop off and that motivated me to finish the job.

This time however, I sought advise from community. I can't remember the exact forum but it's out there. And here's the trick that makes the impossible possible.

And just like that the bracket let go of the cables.

See no need to cut and break stuff. Once again I've got frustrated, done some stupid things and solved nothing. In the retrospect, it did feel nice taking a grinder to the car. :)