How to Fix Your Park Brake Lever

Symptoms:

When the park brake lever is pumped, it can do one of the following:

• "Freewheels" - where it makes no clicking sounds and the pedal can be pumped infinitely with little effort and park brake will not set.
• Works normally, but does not set the park brakes. Can be pumped infinitely with no results.
• Works normally, but must be pumped very slowly for the park brakes to set.
• Works normally, but automatically releases the park brake intermittently.

Cause:

The lubrication becomes extremely viscous and gums up in two locations: a spring-loaded arm on the inside of the lever arm itself which engages the cable drive gear, and another spring-loaded ratcheting arm that holds the gear drive. You can verify that this is the cause by manually pushing the mechanical arms. They will feel extremely dampened and will not quickly return to their original position.

Repair:

You can fix the park brake lever to where it works like new. This involves simply lubricating the areas where two mechanical arms pivot until the mechanical arms can move freely.

First, you will have to remove the dash bottom cover to see the park brake mechanism. Figure 1 shows the right side of the park brake lever mechanism, which is what you'd see when looking at the mechanism from under the dash. The ratcheting arm is shown in red in the illustration (Fig. 1). It locks the gear drive in place which sets the park brake. Lubricate it at the point where it pivots until it moves freely. When you push on it and then release it, it should quickly snap back to its original position.

Figure 1 - Right side of park brake. Lubricate so lever (shown in red) moves freely.

Some people have suggested the possibility of replacing the 1988-93 style (pump-to-set) park brake lever with that from a 1994-up (press once to set, press again to release) style park brake lever. Unfortunately, this is just not possible. Click here to see why.