Parking/Emergency Brake Adjustment

[Malleus]

Thread resurrection - how much drag should the parking brake at rest/before engaging the brake lever? If I tighten the star adjuster tight to grab the brake and back off 8 clicks per FSM, I still hear a little drag when turning the wheels by hand - it isn't continous but drags a little in part of the rotation. Should I back the star adjuster to the point of no drag at all?

Your drums need to be turned. They aren't round if you only have drag at part of the rotation.

 

[cahill]

Your drums need to be turned. They aren't round if you only have drag at part of the rotation.

That came to mind too, but they are brand new OEM rear rotors for a 1997 and I recall the same thing with my other 1997 with new rotors as well when doing the brakes/calipers a few years ago thinking that it was a bit odd but someone had said that it was normal and it would wear away the part that was touching. Why would both vehicles have the same slight brushing of the brake shoes with new OEM rotors? I didn't put all 6 lug nuts onto the rotor - only 2 or 3 but maybe I should have?

Either way - should there be no parking brake touching at all when backing off the star adjuster or are people letting there be slight audible contact? When I back it off to where there is no contact, the brake lever has to be pulled very near verticle and gets tight but it doesn't engage the pariking brakes enough to keep it from rolling down a slight incline when in neutral - I didn't adjust the parking brake lever nut yet but wanted to adjust the shoes before doing that.

 

[Malleus]

The shoes are designed to pivot, so they may not be positioned exactly concentric at first, but the pivot is there to make sure they get that way. There should be no dragging sound when the parking brake is released.

 

[cahill]

I'll dig into it again and see - maybe they were pivoted a little when adjustin the washer causing the rubbing. Even with it pivoted I would expect that the rubbing would be continuous, but I could be wrong about that. I'll tighten the parking brake shoes up again and re-adjust but this time I'll do it with the disk mounted using all 6 lug nuts instead of 2, engage the parking brake and release it again to make sure the shoes square up and see if the intermittent rubbing still happens.