Broken boot(trunk) cable

On the last day of the club meeting at Lake Garda, I pulled the lever to open the boot and the cable snapped! Thank goodness the coupé has rear seats that recline forward giving access to the boot from inside the car! I had all by stuff in there and it would have been a difficult last day without it. I had a bit of time yesterday so I decided to investigate what I could do to fix the issue. I needed to remove the lever to see what was going on, but the bolt head under the lever just turned without undoing. I spoke to Mark Devaney and he said that there should not be a bolt but just a stud on the back of the lever and access is quite easy from the side by just lifting out the rear seat bottom. Sure enough he was right! The stud was there all right and the nut on the back of it came undone with no problem. The bolt, I discovered, was an addition by someone and the nut on the back of that came off too - it serves no purpose so I didn't reinstall it when putting things back together.

With the lever out I could see that the cable had snapped where it fixes to the lever itself and with a little fishing around I found the cable and with a tug with some pliers the boot opened! There was enough cable left to simply cut back the cable housing and reattach the cable to the lever. To tension the cable properly I decided to detach the cable from the boot catch first, fit the lever and then pull and re-affix the cable to the boot end.

The cable itself is a single strand and with time and wear is prone to snap. As it snapped close to the lever it was not a great problem to open the boot, but had it snapped at the boot catch end... well, that would be another story! To make life easy if the same thing were to occur again I decided to fit a second cable and simply lay it in the boot for emergencies. I had a spare bike brake cable handy so I used that attaching a "T" piece to the other end from the boot catch. The cable runs around the boot together with the original cable but instead of going into the side panel, lays under the boot carpet just behind the rear seat. If the original cable should break again I can just lower the rear seat back, pull on the emergency cable and "voilà"!



Here the extra "after market" bolt can be seen:

Once the lever is removed, the cable can be seen:

The back of the lever showing the extra hole and the top part where the cable attaches:

With the rear seat bottom removed, access can be gained to the back of the lever area:

The boot catch with original cable attached:

The boot catch with the extra cable attached:

The other end of the emergency cable: