Parking brake replacement / addition cost?

Hey y'all. Im in need of some technical guidance. I am looking at buying a 2003 extra cab, off road 4x4 from a private party. The issue:

He had the axle replaced and chose not to re install the park brake... He said 'the e-brake was a choose to save money when I had the axle replaced'. I asked if he got a quote for repair and he said 'you would need new cables, which aren't expensive. but the mechanic wasn't sure about the backing plates, and I never followed up'

With that being said, how easy / expensive of a fix would this be? Is there something within the axle that would require me / a shop to take it off and disassemble? Or is it as simple as buying some new cables, taking apart the drum brakes and hooking it all back up?

Would like to move forward with this guy, but if its going to cost an arm and a leg to fix, im out.

 

Edited for better clock positions:

There are 2 sections of cables that make up the e-brake system. One running from the t-handle, and another running from the backing plates of the rear axle. They meet darn near under the driver side door on the inside of the frame rail. It’s a pretty easy system to be honest. I will warn you though that there are two different styles of rear cables available and an easy way to dictate which ones you need is the placement of the cable connections on the backing plate. Models with e-lockers have them located in the 3 o’clock or 6oclock position (depending on which side you’re looking at), the other style has the connectors closer to the 1 and 11 o’clock positions.

hope this clears things up for you.

 

This could get very expensive very fast !!!! As you are not to the point to crawl under the truck and see just what your dealing with

This is scary an axle replaced by a so called Mechanic that can not hook up the parking brake .

Do the rear and Front gear ratios even match ??

Something is really very wrong !!!unless you just worded things different

Is it possible to find out what year the axle came out of

Without knowing just what you have it is impossible to figure the cost

take some pictures of the backing plates

The thing is using the parking brake adjusts the rear shoes without one your manually adjusting

Best of Luck !!

 

@Bivouac makes some incredibly good points here. Definitely follow through with these questions and concerns

 

I replaced my rear axle housing and none of the parking brake cable brackets lined up on the new housing I was able to find. If I didn't have a welder and a grinder yeah I would've just left the parking brake out as well.

 

Not sure that's entirely correct. Both the 8 and 8.4 axles can have either of the backing plate orientations. Some 03 and all 04 the parking brake cable was moved below the leaf pack.

Above the leaf pack = Vertical bell cranks (in your terms, 1 and 11 o'clock)
Below the leaf pack = Horizontal bell cranks (in your terms, 3 and 6 o'clock)

I have an 01 with (factory) e-locker, with the vertical bell cranks and parking brake cable above the leaf packs (1 and 11)...

Either way, to sort that you, you'll need to identify what parts from the parking brake system remain on the truck. If the cable is just removed from the midpoint under the driver's seat, and the bell cranks are in working order, then a new cable is going to be around $150 from the looks of it, but might be more depending on what's actually missing.

 

Yeah I passed on buying this truck. So no worries, thanks