Preventative maintenance item: lubricate parking brake adjuster

seans

Member
Today I heard a brake squeak and felt the van dragging. I pulled and released the parking brake handle. I could sense slack in the parking brake cable not being fully taken up.

The parking brake adjuster is the device beneath the van where the single brake cable from the passenger compartment splits into a cable for each rear wheel. There is also a tensioning spring.

I pulled into a parking lot and looked under the van. The adjuster was rusted. Banging gently with a small sledge I watched it move and the cable tighten with each strike.

At home, I shot WD-40 into the mechanism and freed it up with several pulls of the parking brake.

The wise thing to do next will be to pull the wheels and inspect for brake and hub bearing damage, as this happened to one of the three posters below whose parking brake adjusters were also binding:

https://sprinter-source.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26088
https://sprinter-source.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14934
https://sprinter-source.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25881

Note that all four instances of binding were reported by people from areas where the roads are salted during winter.

This will become a periodic maintenance item for me. Perhaps someone can recommend a more permanent lubricant than WD-40 for this item.

This occurred on a 2006 T1N with 108,000 miles.

parking-brake-adjuster.jpg
 

Dingo

New member
Beat with hammer to break rust bonds & then get someone to operate handbrake while you apply oil ( any sort of oil , does not even need to be on Bevo list ) over pivot points & slides .

You can even remove the assy & do the work on the bench , but in situ is quicker & just as effective :bash::bash::bash:

when it is working again , absolutely smother the whole assembly with grease , I speak from experince on this subject as i had to lie in a snow melt puddle to hammer off my handbrake . Brakes had locked on due to heat build up , so only action was hammer based . felt much better afterwards & a lot warmer
 

Dingo

New member
I hear Monty Python 's Life of Brian in that last post

Anyway Vic no troops to rally they are all too busy cleaning EGR's , swapping resonators & pipes or tryign to make OBD readers work with their sprinter , think i'm fairly safe :rolleyes:
 

terra_firma

Member
I'm also dealing with a seized up parking brake. I noticed the slack had gone out of my brake handle for able a week until i noticed a scraping sound every i backed my van up, i went underneath and noticed the brake was tightened all the way, i lubed it up with some wd-40 and pushed the "brake cable equalizing lever" towards the back of the van and it seemed to take the parking brake off the back wheels.

Question is, did i do permanent damage to the parking break shoes, or anything behind the "brake cable equalizing level"?

I've just been not using the parking brake for the time being. I also noticed if i grab the parking brake handle, theres a little more tension than there was before, and if i actually pull the handle up, it will engage the parking brake (but the parking brake stays stuck on the back wheels when you drop the handle down)

Also noticed that the Parking brake alert sound only responds to the handle being up, the fact that the brake was seized onto the rear wheels, and the brake handle was released did not throw off any alarms.
 

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