When I was at Luscious Garage earlier today for a transmission service, the technician told me that my parking brake is out of adjustment. Sure enough, I checked the factory service manual when I got home and found that the spec is 8-11 notches at 67.5lbf. My own test revealed that it was taking between 15-17 notches on mine! Has anyone experienced the same problem with their parking brake? Of course my dealer did not say anything about this during their extensive 15k inspection.
OK, just came in from adjusting it. Tools needed are two 10mm combo wrenches and a flashlight if you're working at night. You need to remove long piece of trim that extends parallel to the door sill, remove the screw for the kick panel and remove the kickpanel, and then use your fingers to pull the lower instrument panel finish panel down. The lower instrument panel finish panel is the plastic panel which houses your mirror adjustment and has the empty blanks. Prior to the adjustment, the parking brake felt somewhat loose and a gentle push for engagement would yield 10-12 clicks. If you stomp on it hard as I normally do, you would get between 15-17 clicks. The independent hybrid shop told me today that adjustment was needed so I did the job myself. The adjustment nut was quite loose and only after 5-6 full turns did I begin to feel some resistance. I think I turned the nut about 7 full turns in the end. After the adjustment, if I do a gentle push to engage the parking brake, it results in 5 notches. If I give it a bit more pressure and/or stomp on it like I normally do, it takes 7 notches. The parking brake pedal also feels reasonably firm as well, unlike before. The car rolls fine in neutral. If I put the car in Drive and allow it to roll and try to use the parking brake to stop the car, it takes 2 clicks before the car will come to a stop. Similarly, if the car is rolling backwards on a flat surface in neutral, it takes 1 click to stop the car. With those results, I am assuming that this means the parking brake is properly adjusted and is not dragging excessively? Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.
Well if it is too tight, it won't be in a few miles as the pads will wear. Seems that one-two clicks to stop the car seems pretty tight to me. Thanks for the heads-up and instructions!
I agree with Spidy. 2 Clicks to overcome the built in creep sounds tight. One way to check is to jack the rear end up and spin the wheels. A parking brake shouldn't be inducing any more drag than normal disc brake drag when it's released.
I would back it off a bit, at least to the middle of the specified range. You don't want the parking brake imposing extra drag. I've had a lot of Hondas over the years, and service departments were without exception overzealous in tightening parking brake adjusters. If it's too tight you'll be imposing a constant drag. A good way to check is to lift the entire back (be safe, use jackstands) enough to get the tires a bit free of the ground. Spin the wheel with the pedal completely released. There will be a slight amount of drag from the pads being in contact, but it's minor. Then start clicking the pedal on, a click at a time (guess you have to click once, release, then reclick, with the Prius press/release pedal) and see where it starts to add resistance. And thanks for the info, good to know where the adjuster is. I have the Repair Manual, but it's a real tome, hard to find stuff.
I have an electronic version which allied you to search by term. I can share it with you if you want. I went ahead and backed off the adjustment nut by 1.5 turns. With medium effort it is now taking 8-9 clicks. I drove to the dealer and tried a 2011 Prius 5 and it too did 8-9 clicks so I think mine is OK. The stiffness of the pedal between mine and the one on the lot is equal as well. Looking back I think mine was not properly adjusted from the factory. The adjustment nut was essentially spinning freely and only now, after tightening it several turns, does it have any resistance at all. I have also noticed thay the brakes now work better. MB860 ?
you're probably right, but i'd rather have it too loose than too tight. as long as it holds strong on a steep hill!
Thanks, but I'm fine. Have a pdf which has a bookmarked index of sorts. It's actually a lot easier to manage since I just upgraded pc's. It used to bogged down on my old pc. What I'll do when I find something interesting is just select it and "print" to a fresh pdf. You need full acrobat, or some freeware equivelant (CutePDF is one), Acrobat Reader can't create pdf. It's a somewhat funky method but works ok. Yeah, sounds like it was too lose from the factory, and you have it dialed in now.
