Good day!

I have a strange problem with the adjustment of my parking brake. In Massachusetts it has to hold at 1200 RPM. This is a 1988 745 with 167,000 miles on it.

I ran out of threads on the plastic nut to tighten the cable, so I pulled the rotors to see what was going on with the parking brake shoes. On both sides the lining had rusted away from the metal of the shoe. I would think that the shoes should last at least 30 years, but it is what it is.

I put in new shoes and a hardware kit (new flat spring holders and new shoe springs) and again tried to adjust the brake to hold. No go, lever pulls all the way up, brake does not hold. Huh? Pulled rotors to verify that the shoe is seated in the actuator, the actuators are working and expanding the shoes. When the rotor is back on and the handbrake lever is pulled up all the way and the plastic nut is out all the way the cables on the axel just don't feel as taught as they should be. (I'll add here that I replaced the yoke with the kit which attaches to the axel housing with a U-bolt about three or four years ago)

Sigh.. .

So while looking at the cable sheath and how it engages in the metal console which holds it, while the cable wire goes through and is attached to the lever mechanism, I wished that I could pull the sheath back to take up some of the slack. So I got some large washers which had an inside diameter which would hold the sheath end and threaded the cable through them. This essentially took out over an inch of slack. Yay! The lever now starts to get tension about half way up, but it still goes to the top. And the parking brake still does not grab as well as it should.

I think my next step is to pull the cables and see if perhaps a sheath has split.

Any other ideas?