Adjusting Your Parking Brake (Auto Repair)

These instructions for adjusting your parking brake work only if you have drum brakes on your rear wheels. If you have a manual transmission, you may have a transmission-type parking brake, which should be adjusted professionally and parking brakes on rear-wheel disc brakes should be left to professionals, too. Your service manual may tell you which kind you have, or you can crawl under the vehicle and see for yourself. (Chapter 10 describes both integral and transmission-type parking brakes and shows you what they look like.) Because most people have integral parking brakes, that’s the type I deal with in this section. Figure 18-17 shows you several types of integral parking brakes.

Figure 18-17:
Integral parking brakes may look different, but you adjust them all in the same way.

You shouldn’t have to pull or push the parking brake handle to the most extreme level to make the brake work. (As the cables loosen up, you have to pull the handle up higher to engage the brake.)
You shouldn’t be able to drive the vehicle with the parking brake on. If you can, the brake needs to be adjusted or repaired.
To adjust your parking brake, do the following:
1. Jack up the car (a hoist would be lovely) and make sure that it’s secure (see Chapter 1 for instructions). Be sure to leave your parking brake off.
You can also slide underneath with a work light if you don’t want to jack the car up.
2. Trace the thin steel cables that run from each of your rear wheels until they meet somewhere under the backseat of the car.
Where they meet, there should be a device (usually a bar and a screw) that controls the tension. Compare what you find with the parking brakes in Figure 18-17 to see which type you have.
3. Turn the screw (or whatever else you have) until the cables tighten up, and then tighten the screw nuts to hold the screw in place.
You may have to hold the cable to keep it taut (refer to Figure 18-17).
4. Get out from under the vehicle and test-drive it to see whether the parking brake is working.
5. While you’re at it, pay attention to whether the parking brake warning light on your dashboard is working. If it isn’t, check or replace the bulb or fuse.
You can find instructions for checking fuses in Chapter 12. If changing the bulb or fuse doesn’t work, get someone to check the connection between the warning light and the brake; there may be a short in it.