Passenger Side Emergency Brake

I was messing around the garage tonight and decided to check the passenger side emergency brake. I jacked the Corvette and removed the caliper as before.

Everything went smoothly and I started checking the system. This time the brake mechanism itself was OK but the shoes were not that good. Most likely they had been dragging for some time and overheated. This had opened some cracks in the lining. They were still in one piece though so I decided to put everything back together and hope they would last my light use.

Finally I adjusted the shoes and put the wheel back. I didn't take the car for a test drive but the emergency brake handle was quite firm now so hopefully this problem is finally solved.

Emergency Brake Problems

Like mentioned in the previous post, my emergency brake was not working properly. Because of this the car failed its inspection and could not be driven any more. Luckily the driving season was pretty much over already so I decided to leave the fix for later. This was a month ago so I thought that now would be a good time.

As tuning just the cable or adjusting the shoes through the hole in the brake disk didn't work, I needed to see the mechanism itself. This required me to remove the brake caliper and disk. The driver side was worse according to the inspectors, so I began there.

I removed the two bolts that held the caliper in place and then hung it from the frame with zip ties. Now the disk could be just pulled off. Pretty soon I found the problem. I saw that the actuating lever had slipped off the other shoe and actually didn't spread them at all. A few minutes with a screwdriver fixed it. I couldn't find anything else wrong so I put everything back together.

Naturally I needed to tune the brake shoes and the cable again but after those took a short test drive. The brake felt much better already but perhaps I'll check the passenger side too later...