morning all...went to replace the rear rotors and pads yesterday...all went smoothly on both sides, got the passenger parking cable back in no problem.

went to replace the cable on the driver side, but there was not enough slack in the cable to get it back on.

the adjuster is rusted solid.

i read here that the brake mechanism can seize... the lever appears to go all the way back, but does not come forward enough to get the cable in...the total movement of the lever is about 1/2 inch or so. From my understanding of other posts, the issue with lever is that it will not "return" completely...i seem to have the opposite problem!....does this sound like i need a new caliper?...the cable does move in and out when i attach vice grips and pull it.

i only need about another 1/8" of slack to get it in...any ideas?

 

iownme, well, you can try getting your hands on a decently size screw driver and manually moving the e-brake arm that way. You may have also not backed the piston in far enough to have adequate room to get the cable on.

On a side note, I will be up in Rochester in just over a week. If we can meet up somewhere, I will take a look at things. I won't have all my tools, but it sounds like you have what I would need.

 

I had this same problem with my replacement caliper after my old one seized. It was a PITA, but I used a clamp and some muscle to get the cable to go back in. Yeah, I know it's not the best thing to do, but if your adjuster is frozen, it's the only real way to get it to go back in. You can check if your caliper is frozen by removing the caliper and trying to move the ebrake cable lever on the back of the caliper. If that lever is frozen then you have an issue. For me, mine was so frozen that I couldn't even get it to move with a steel rod and a hammer.

 

thanks Thermo and Disguay.
can the piston be wound in enough to get the caliper over the new pads and rotor but not to get the cable on? (does that make sense?)
the lever does go all the way back to its resting place, and it does move forward about 1/2" no problem.

This morning when driving back from NY to PA for the first 50 miles it felt like one of the calipers "may" have been sticking slightly, then it seemed to free up and all was fine (right before the 1st rest area of course!)

so i think maybe the 1 caliper that is currently connected to the parking brake cable may be the caliper with an issue...next nice day i'll take it all apart again and re check everything.

Thermo...i'm a couple of hours from Rochester..but i owe rochester a visit, maybe soon we can meet up there...you seem to be there somewhat often?

The new rotors and pads made a huge difference on the car...the old rotors must have been toasted....the pads still had a lot of meat on for 25000 miles

 

Iownme, what you can do is pull the ebrake lever and then go under the car and look at the cable adjuster bar. If you have a bad caliper in the rear, that bar will point to one front wheel and one rear wheel. The rear wheel the bar points to is the wheel with the frozen caliper. If it turns out that your caliper is frozen, they are DIRT cheap on car-part.com or on ebay. I got mine on ebay for something crazy like $25-$30 with shipping included.

 

iownme, I have gotten a rough idea of what my schedule is going to be like. I am working days (6A-6P), 6 days a week with my day off being either Thursday or Friday (possibly being changed between those days). The week of October 15th I am only working M-F, 8A-5P with the weekend off. But, starting the 22nd, I am fairly busy with the work going on. I will tentatively be leaving around Nov 9th. All depends on how the outage is going and whether they need me to stick around longer.