We just got a safety inspection for our car.

A few days later, the parking brake stopped working.

It is a big pain right now to lift the car and look under it to figure out what went wrong.

What broke on your parking brake?

I hope I can repair it before next January, because it will need to be working to pass safety inspection again.

Maybe it is a dumb idea to use the parking brake on old cars. I might stop this.

 

my rear connection with the two cables snapped off due to rust i ended up redoing all new cables :/

 

Hard to say what may brake but, yeah, the cables in rust areas would be suspect. You gotta get in there and look--no other way to be sure...

I use the parking brake on an automatic car only when parked on an incline, to get the stress off the tranny, otherwise, no.

 

Well the weather warmed up and I got under the car. Pulled on the cables and nothing loose. Pulled the handle up and there's tension on all the cables.

WTF?

This:

 

Are the cables stretched? I have an "89 Buick Reatta and this is quite common. After using all of the take up adjustment in the adjuster mechanism. Still nothing. The solution is to replace the "stretched" cables. Maybe the same problem with yours.

 

I went through this on my 850... on that model, there are two cables that run from the handle back to each rear hub. One or both can be frozen. have somebody actuate the handle while you check for any movement at the hubs. If none, new cables. Again for the 850, the parking brake shoes are inside the rear hub so you need to pull off the caliper and rotors and remove the hub's cover. There's a star adjuster to retract the shoes to pull off the hub. When I did this I discovered a lot of rust and on a couple of the shoes the friction pad completely separated from the plate. This can also lead to creating drag or jamming up the wheel or limiting the action on the cable.

 

My cables are probably stretched because of wear. But my loss of parking brake action was not caused by a broken cable as I suspected.

The linings fell off the parking brake shoes! And shifted around so that the expander on that side had a much wider range of movement.