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Just wanted to share my experience on completing the job yesterday while the weather was freakishly warm (55F) for NYC. Of course, today, the sleet/snow comes back with a vengeance.
A few months ago, the little 'peg' on the end of the cable that goes into the parking brake lever broke, leaving me with no parking brake. Not a big deal since the car is an automatic, but something I still like having the use of.
The job started out by opening up the center armrest/console area and removing the rear ashtray and ashtray mounting fixture. Loosen up the cable to the max by turning the plastic adjusting nut as much as possible.
Loosened the lugnuts of both wheels (just in case) and jacked up the rear of the vehicle (after chocking the front wheels on both sides from rear and front... THIS IS A MUST) and placed it on jackstands. Herein lies the troubles that I encountered: I do not have a nice floor jack. I have a bottlejack. What happened is that the bottlejack brought the vehicle up to a nice height, BUT when I lowered the car back down on jackstands located under the axle, the car would lower even more since the weight was still on the suspension. This resulted in a very low clearance. Not the ideal situation for getting under the vehicle. You need a good amount of clearance to comfortably get under the vehicle to disconnect things.
Second problem. The long cable goes to the LEFT parking brake. I removed the left wheel and rotor and removed the brake shoes. Removing the parking brake shoes is a huge pain because of the strong springs. While I was at it, I banged out the wheel studs because they needed replacing. Figured it was a good time to take care of it. I threaded the leftside cable back towards the center of the vehicle where there was a little mounting piece and started disconnecting things. There are 2 cotter pins and R-type retaining clips there. This is where my second problem occurred. One of the pins and clips came off with no problems. I chose to save and reuse the clip. The other clip came out without a problem but the pin was rusted in there pretty solidly. This pin held the rightside cable in. Great, time to break out the PBlaster spray. After wiggling and banging at the pin for a good 10 minutes, it came out. Pblaster: 1, stuck pin: 0. Again, doing this without clearance under the vehicle is a pain in the butt. Stuff kept falling into my eyes... a painful experience. I couldn't find my working glasses unfortunately. :(
Finally, with everything disconnected, I threaded the cable back. About 1/2 between the rear axle and the hole into the console inside the vehicle, there is another retaining bracket. In order to remove the cable, you have to undo the bracket, at least I think you do. This requires a 10mm wrench for one side, and a 10mm socket for the other side. Finally, a little yanking and tugging and a lot of bad words later, I got the cable out. Putting the new cable in was very, very easy and you basically just do everything in reverse.
So, what have we learned today? If you have a lift and power tools, this job will take you all of 15 minutes. If you are like me, it will take you 2.5 hours including cleanup time.
On the plus side, I have a working parking brake again, and it feels much more smooth and consistent than it used to before!
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Ken
1990 Volvo 740 base sedan (B230F)
My Volvo 'Project'
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