"Bob Falooley" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Hey,
Recently I had some work done to my car including replacing the
parking breaks. My procedure for parking the car is, depress break
pedal, put in park, activate parking break, release break pedal. Now,
in my mind, the car should stay put, and not drift downhill an inch or
two and come to rest. When it does this I believe the weight of the
car is being supported by the transmission. (I could definatly be
wrong here, I don't know much about cars).
So as this began to happen to my car, I took it in and replaced the
parking breaks and some other things. It seemed to make it worse, so
I took the car back in, and they adjusted the parking breaks again.
They seem tighter now, but this gave me the idea to try to really test
it. So I parked on a slight hill, and used the same procedure above,
but instead of putting it in park, I put it in neutral. The car
procedes to creak and creap down the hill, and won't stop until I
apply the foot breaks.
Should the parking break totally stop the car on a reasonable grade?
Am I paranoid on having the cars weight "supported by the
transmission" like what would happen when you don't use a parking
break at all? Should I bring the car in for a third time to get them
to adjust it again, Imean I paid good money for them to fix this. Are
my tests unreasonable?
Couple of things. What Jerry said is right, at least for drum brakes.
The parking brake isn't a brake at all, it's just a wire connected, at
least in my day, to the front brake shoe on each of the rear drums.
That's two brake shoes out of eight the car has, so you shouldn't expect
more than 1/4 the stopping power of your regular brakes, less if your
regular brakes are power-assisted in any way (which is pretty common
these days). The reason for having a wire connected to a brake is in
case the hydraulic system that normally works the brakes fails. After
all, a leak in it anywhere can mean that when you put your foot down,
all you're doing is forcing brake fluid out onto the street instead of
actuating the braking mechanism of your car.
Automatic transmissions have a parking mechanism and a hill-grabber as
well - using either is just fine and will not hurt your transmission one
bit. On a manual transmission, leaving the car in gear will use the
compression in the engine as a brake, and that, while it does engage the
transmission to bear a load, won't hurt anything, either.
How well the parking brake works isn't much under your control - the
only thing you can do is have the slack taken out of the wire so that,
when you engage it, it engages as much brake as it can before the lever
mechanism runs out of travel.
How all this works for disc brakes is something I haven't a clue about,
but I worked on a lot of cars a few decades ago and they all had
parking/emergency brakes, and those brakes could all be adjusted
relatively easily to work well enough to stop the car while moving, and
certainly they could all hold the car on all but the steepest hill.
In your place, I'd put in a call to a dealer who sells and services your
brand/model of car, and ask them on the phone if the parking/emergency
brakes actually work well enough to do anything. It might be worth it
to get a second opinion here, if not from a dealer, then at least from
another mechanic.
I was into VW's in the 70's, even rebuilt a couple of engines, and was
offered, but turned down, a job as a full-time mechanic by the place
where I used to buy my parts - so don't ask me about cooling systems. 🙂
-S-
http://www.kbnj.com
