(RANT) Dear Toyota Parking Brake Engineer..... (1 Viewer)

[Dagtwo]

I don't consider myself a mean or hateful person. I'm also not a liar. And I'd be lying out my a$$ if I said I would like to buy you a cold beer for your incredible engineering. Really, I hope you led a virtuous life and are heading somewhere amazing in the afterlife. But, if not..... a part of me might be hoping the devil has carved you out a special place where you'll spend eternity assembling and disassembling the parking brakes from behind the hub. With minimal light and cheap tools. And when you throw tools in frustration, they boomerang right back at you.

-Sincerely, someone who just replaced the parking brake shoes. Assisted by my 10 yr old son who I had to give cussing pass to after the 21st F***KING TIME the F**KING piece of SH*T, GOD D**M retaining washer came off while trying to secure that stupid F**CKng c**k sucker in the c*nt hair of space provided behind a GIANT F**CKING hub with the bullsh*t, chinesium, amazon f**k-all excuse for drum brake hold down spring pliers !!!!!!!!!

MY SON: SH*T!!
ME: I know!!! SH*T!!! SH*T!! It's your god d**m mother's fault! I told her I'd take care of this when she said the brakes we squeaking! She didn't have to nag me by bringing it up again 8 months later! Now we're rushed and have to replace all 4 rotors, brakes, and front calipers! And since we're doing the rear rotors AND b/c someone who's name I won't mention cause it's mine, drove F**CKing miles with the GOD D*MN parking brake engaged while towing.... all while b*tching about how sh*tty the U-haul trailer brakes are.... we're replacing the parking brake shoes too.
MY SON: s***...
ME: alright, that's enough...

/s

 

[Randy88FJ62]

As I've grown more experienced on Toyota trucks I've given in to spending money on the right tools including parking brake pliers etc.

 

[Racerman27410]

I feel your pain. When i got my one owner 05 i noticed the parking brake not working but just figured it needed adjusting.....

WRONG! I pulled the hubs and the entire parking brake assemblies were just gone! I suppose that whoever was working on it lost some blood and patience....decided it was too much hassle and just threw everything across the garage.

It was a lot of fun getting all the parts together and then figuring out how it all fit together... Luckily i have some prior experience with drum brakes so i wasnt completely in the dark but still.... DAMN!.

I finally modified a long thin pair of needle nose pliers to get the spring retainers on through that stupid hole in the hub,

Some fun for sure and i dont look forward to having to ever do that job again.

 

[xrm1996]

I don't consider myself a mean or hateful person. I'm also not a liar. And I'd be lying out my a$$ if I said I would like to buy you a cold beer for your incredible engineering. Really, I hope you led a virtuous life and are heading somewhere amazing in the afterlife. But, if not..... a part of me might be hoping the devil has carved you out a special place where you'll spend eternity assembling and disassembling the parking brakes from behind the hub. With minimal light and cheap tools. And when you throw tools in frustration, they boomerang right back at you.

-Sincerely, someone who just replaced the parking brake shoes. Assisted by my 10 yr old son who I had to give cussing pass to after the 21st F***KING TIME the F**KING piece of SH*T, GOD D**M retaining washer came off while trying to secure that stupid F**CKng c**k sucker in the c*nt hair of space provided behind a GIANT F**CKING hub with the bullsh*t, chinesium, amazon f**k-all excuse for drum brake hold down spring pliers !!!!!!!!!

MY SON: SH*T!!
ME: I know!!! SH*T!!! SH*T!! It's your god d**m mother's fault! I told her I'd take care of this when she said the brakes we squeaking! She didn't have to nag me by bringing it up again 8 months later! Now we're rushed and have to replace all 4 rotors, brakes, and front calipers! And since we're doing the rear rotors AND b/c someone who's name I won't mention cause it's mine, drove F**CKing miles with the GOD D*MN parking brake engaged while towing.... all while b*tching about how sh*tty the U-haul trailer brakes are.... we're replacing the parking brake shoes too.
MY SON: s***...
ME: alright, that's enough...

/s

The thin membrane between the polite civility of one's cultivated public persona that openly appreciates the brilliant work of the emperor's tailor is once again pierced by the phoned-in crap design decisions of some slob sending needless pain endlessly branching and cascading forward in time as the pressure of their generally well-concealed personal wiring exceeds the membrane's strength. The more one learns, the more amazing how badly executed everything really is. This is the opposite of consoling and for that I apologize. As they say, embrace the suck.

A glimpse into "design"... back when I used to be useful, for about 30 years, I got on planes sometimes daily (2M miles) to go un-F-up designs of high-speed digital electronics... systems (supercomputers, mainframes, highly parallel thingies) and also precision components.. when a room full of smart guys had the flavor of fault signatures that was what I worked in. 130 rescue consults over that time. Given the pedigrees of the typical people in those roles, you would think the problem was some cosmically esoteric physical principle and everyone would be "Oh... the Johansen Effect... I did not know about that." Nope. The vast majority of times it was insufficceint intellectual effort and/or excessive confidence, both colored by a rather strongly missing intuition about the stochastic nature of problems and solutions. No matter who you are......... THIS is the governing dynamic of everything.

There is a Gaussian for each decider's average ability... intelligence... effort... executive control... knowledge... confidence/balls-to-brains ratio... it's daunting. And each design decision any designer makes... each technical decision really... is the mathematical product of oh...... about a 1000 of those. After all those consults, and then doing "decision overwatch" for some people very close to me undergoing potentially infinitely severe medical issues, my own direct personal data forces a conclusion that a designed-in fault is rarely the education or intelligence of that decider, but instead at least temporarily suspended effort or the balls-to-brains ratio being too high (over confidence for a given ability set). Everyone phones it in at some point. You can have habits of the mind that reduce your incidence of these modes of decision failure, but I see no way to hit zero given the standard design/wiring of the human mind (the system-one mind and the OK Plateau being two biggies if anyone gets interested in such things).

If you look at your pain... the e-brake designer..... as an ACTUAL designer, I am offended that that kid dares call himself a designer. NFW. More likely some kid on his initial rotation thru a bunch of areas, his employer attempting to convert him from barely educated utterly useless no-hours millennial into something sorta useful. The talking haircuts who make such assignments rarely (cf Gaussian) recognizing how their own decision to do creative consequential work this way affects many many many people downstream. The punk who put out the set of design decisions of which you speak was UTTERLY unaware of a plethora of things Real Designers do as a matter of course..... Primum non nocere.... the stochastic nature of not only all problems but all solutions... resolving competing harms... user-experience... etc. Rest assured he needed his diaper changed when he turned in his "design".... he finally figured out that he didn't KNOW squat. The system KIND OF works in that nobody would let him near any problem or solution-design that required experience, domain knowledge, wisdom, intelligence/abstraction abilities, stochastic intuition, and other personal characteristics needed to give one a fighting chance.

Add to that, at least in the US... less in other places IMO, EVERYONE is a solution designer. I made the mistake of going into a star buck's once a year or so back and there at the counter was a gaggle of soccer moms all opining not on, say.... which piece of bread gets the PB and which gets the jelly... or how cosmically superior their new Italian marble countertops are as compared to the pimp and his mistress that live next door to them in the cheap New Orleans brothel revival on the cul de sac, but on how to fix the 737Max design. I HAD to listen in..... scary, and yet... they KNEW they were on to something. Everyone is a designer in modern life but only the idiots do the work to accumulate the training and experience. The rest of royal born. This confidence has permeated the design world. For the last half of my life doing rescue consults I had the "lobby rule"... if a 20 something comes thru the doors to bring me in, I'm gone. Polite... feign illness or something but gone. I do this as much for the hunt as for the bucks and the probability that kid will feed my soul is essentially zero... plenty of problems out there. Work the fun ones. You start to notice life is short at a certain point. If you don't design every day, don't design on ANY day.

You found one of many land mines designed right in to your high-complexity system and I'm sorry to report there will be..... correction.... there ARE many more that will pop out to say hello. To paraphrase a famous bowler, "entropy does not stop and start at your convenience". The system you have is not the system they describe in the brochure (know that I laugh out loud every time I type that line in). The people who designed it are not the people they tout in their industrial videos. But as compared to say..... a Land Rover (popular over on the cul de sac with the yuppies and soccer moms).. you do have a winner. You have the M1 rifle of SUV's. You will endure this BS pain less (stochastically speaking) than if you owned the LR. Though keep in mind too...... the frequency of occurrence of that pain is more than trivially on what you bring to the table on average and at that moment as well. Sorry... just is. It's that way for everyone. Most of what the human mind puts out is pure crap (cf prev Gaussian). And.... the expectation by many humans of perfection (not talking about you here but more the general human being) of PERFECTION is itself ridiculous and uninformed.

BTW.... important (I think) corollary to this. Those years I spent in decision overwatch with potentially high-consequence medical processes... enlightening would be one word. PEOPLE PHONE DECISIONS IN ALL THE TIME. Medicos VERY much included. Very disheartening to come to that understanding. Some day, most of us will be in some doctor's office and hear something that blows your world up. The POSSIBILITY is now on the table in a non-trivial way (oh... and the vastly worse version of this is you hear "everything's good" while something not so good is in there continuing to do more harm). At that point, you need to be an expert on technical decision making in the presence of opaque risk so you can have a sense of what to believe... what advice to follow. If you just luxuriated and enjoyed the financially comfortable salad years (aka the OK Plateau), you're screwed. You're more rusty than you have ever been, and thus your fate is now more firmly in the embrace of luck than it might otherwise have been. Always work your thinking. Cross train. As you train, so shall you fight. And embrace the suck. Nobody's born a good decider/designer. It takes constant effort. Watch Groundhog Day if you want to see constant effort over a long period of time. A lack of effort and an abundance of confidence are where black swans live.

There's a thing called The Lindy Effect. If you want to stochastically elevate your ability to survive your interactions with the designed world, maybe look it up and try to embrace it. Remember... Wikipedia is itself written by people from the big Gaussian... 95% idiots. Include me in that. Good luck... chin up!

X

 

[bigredmachine]

what i always did at the shop was use snap ring pliers in the dimples of the cup to push and twist it in place something like this Grip Snap Ring Pliers — 10-Pc. Set | Northern Tool. its the only pair of pliers that are narrow enough to fit through the hole in the hub and push the cup, it took years and a lot of swearing to figure that one out but desperate times and youll try anything and sometimes get lucky