Parking Brakes on '09 Camry

Look for the video on YouTube, perhaps?

Found this.....you have my sympathy....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHuNLAff1ZY

Hope it looks that easy when/if I ever have to work on my wife's '99 Solara.

Great instructional video. OP really has a job ahead of him.

Drum brakes don't phase me at all. I developed quite a knack for fixing them and it helped pay for beer and textbooks too....

But this drum inside a rotor and the premature dilapidation is something else again.

Surely, if the parking brake gets to this state so soon then it should be serviced very frequently to keep it from getting that way.

The fella in the video seems like he has done this more than once and probably makes good beer and broadband money on the side...

It makes a pleasant change to have threads that are not about Chevy Cavaliers. :-)

I have longed more than once to have the testicles of certain automotive design engineers in my one gloved hand and a dull knife in the other, after struggling for days and having to disassemble parts of the car that had nothing to do with the worn/defective parts but made it otherwise impossible to work on them.

The factory has special assembly tool #A12746V67-7, special offset wrench 46-PO345V9105J and compact puller OU812 to do the job.

"Sorry, your vehicle is over X years old, these tools are obsolete and no replacements are available."

I feel your pain.

Frustrating at best. This is why when you bring it to a dealer and they run into this, the first thing they do is break out the cutting torch and burn off the drum and/or rotor. 5 minutes later, done.

Otherwise, I found the parking drum brake a joy to work on on my wife's Ford Explorer as the smaller springs required much less force to stretch in place as compared to those on my 66 Pontiac Grand Prix.

A note for those of you with Fords. If you are driving around the neighborhood at slow speeds with the window open and you hear a clack-clack noise occassionally, it is the friction material that has separated from the metal shoe piece as they are bonded without rivets.

Wow! that has never happened to me in 50 yrs of driving (including 3 Fords)

Are you sure this is not a Cavalier?

"crappy factory design".....

You didn't say how old your wife's camry is,,however, most manufacturers only supply spares for 10 yrs after manufacturing date. As far as difficulties you experienced, remember that some factory worker assembled it with relevant ease!

So, did you bow deeply and offer your respects to the assembly ? Or did you just shout BANZAI and dive at it , spanner in hand (the Gaijin way)?

Suggest you begin from scratch, in the lotus position, and a better way might be revealed to you (eg the design did not cater for 'back-yard' mechanics without hydraulic lifts)

Utaimytai, Itaiurtai

"You didn't say how old your wife's camry is".

Apologies..I choose to correct myself before someone else does it, with a dollop of sarcasm! I failed to notice the model in the title. I normally never fail to notice a model, even in print...must be getting senile or something.

You managed it just as I was posting!!

Telepathic ! My wife says it's spelt telepathetic.

LOL!!

Your wife has a well developed sense of humor!!

You missed it, its in the title!!

'09 implies 2009, not 1909!!!(remember, Japan did not export cars to the USA 100 years ago either!!)

Have a great day anyway.....

An alternative:

There are several areas of Engineering I have never been able to understand and who is actually the one to blame ( complain about ) .

I have often complained about the individual engineer who designed a particular part, but then later I reexamined the situation and thought maybe that one person was not to blame.

Here are some things I have noticed:

1. How come the outside edges of a metal or plastic part are nice and smooth but the inside edges are sharper than a samurai sword ?

2. How come its easy to remove and replace 5 of the spark plugs on a v-6 but to get at the 6th one you have to take 1/2 of the engine apart ?

3. Why is the $ 2.00 dollar resistor for the heater fan blower placed in the middle upper inside of the dash board and you have to spend 5 hours removing the dash board and another 5 hours putting it back together ?

4. Why is the fuse panel placed under the dash board on the steering wheel side where you have to leave the drivers door open in the pouring rain and kneel on your knees looking for the ignition fuse while traffic is zipping by at 60 mph ?

5 . Why is it that 99% of the fasteners on you car are held together with standard hex bolts and Phillips head screws but to remove the rear tail lamp lenses you have to use a torx driver ?

I have seen some unimaginable things from auto manufacturers over the years, but my "favorite" has to do with the bell-housing bolt pattern of the old Ford Pinto. It seem a customer of mine had two of them. One had a bad transmission, and the other had an engine problem. They were two different engines, but both were similar years, and both were automatics. He wanted the good transmission put into the car with the bad transmission. So I told him " If the bell-housing bolt pattern is the same, I can do it. If not I can not." After removing both transmissions, I compared the thin aluminum plate from the one to the bolt pattern on the engine of the other. All the bolts fit. No problem right? I can get the replacement transmission a half inch away from the engine, but no further. I try to pull it in with some longer bolts, but no go.

It seems that when the newer of the two engines was being designed, the rocket scientists needed to decide on a bolt pattern for the bell-housing. I guess they decided that the one being used on the older motor was darn good, and decided to use it again. Why not? BUT, just to piss off any smart ass that wants to switch transmissions, lets change the OD of the hollow dowels that are used to align the engine to the transmission. The alignment dowels were about an eight of an inch larger than the holes in the transmission. ( Call me if you need a pair of low mileage hollow dowels.)

If there is someone here that can offer a plausible explanation for that SNAFU, please let me know.

Along those lines, but at the very beginning of production of the car, clipboard stopwatch wearing time study engineers would order me to "take a little more time off the panel extractor in delay, a little more, ah that's it", Crunch!

"Uh....excuse me...I gotta be somewhere else"

Rear brakes on small diameter brake drums has always been a tight working environment. But when the manufacturer finds it necessary to have an axle flange two inches wider than the wheel studs, then that is just some pencil pushing, clipboard carrying geek that made a bad decision at my expense. And just to make things a little harder, make that drum about a half inch narrower. And now that they have put that drum brake inside a rotor, we might as well make it smaller again. This will most likely end as the manufacturers design rear discs with mechanically applied pads to work as both standard rear brakes and parking-emergency brakes. But, in the remainder of real life, I would suggest that all of you should use that auxiliary brake occasionally. If for no other reason than to keep the mechanical parts from freezing up in that enclosed dusty dirty environment. Most have some form of self adjusting It should move the adjustment mechanism buy applying it.

GA

I liked your post.

We live on a hill, so brake and gear selected when parking outside is a must anyway.

Nor have ever had a problem with the hand brake on quite a few cars.....as the handbrake is used daily....Every 2 years I need to adjust the cables, no problem....

Agree fully. I don't understand why the handbrake wasn't in daily use...I understand that somewhere in Europe (I think Paris) drivers leave the brake off so that they can be edged away for parking purposes (seems ridiculous to me).Anyone trying to 'edge' my vehicle will face the full resistance of the parking brake, followed by the full wrath of the owner, and probably consequent disproportionate damage to their vehicle.

Along those lines, The municipality I worked for had a small fleet of Mack dump trucks with diesel engines. At the end of the work day, the trucks were lined up in an driveway for the night man to refuel them. It seems it was common to just pull the shut off knob, and leave the parking brake off. One night one of the trucks got bumped from behind, and it started, and ran into the next one in line. Fortunately it stalled there, and the incident ended.

Frequent use is probably the solution on the Camry to ensure one never has to perform this job. I doubt you would wear these out ever. Handbrake is either on or off.

But yeh, handbrake on and in a gear that will launch the vehicle in the least catastrophic direction if it is inadvertently cranked in gear.

One more parking on a hill safety routine was to turn the wheels so the car would only roll as far as the curb...got my first licence in Oz, I think this was part of the practical test too, auto and manual. And handbrake hill starts had to be demonstrated in either auto or manual as well.

It's very flat here (not Oz) mostly. Cars are parked in neutral with handbrake off and wheels straight so they can be pushed around manually. There are loads of Camrys here, I wonder if their handbrakes still work from basically no use at all?

Not sure why the foot operated parking brake in the Camry is called a " hand brake " unless in some models it is operated by hand rather than by foot unless some drivers depress the parking brake by hand only and not by foot.

All the Camrys I've sat in or driven had hand lever operated parking brakes. Googled quickly, seems some have a foot operated parking brake....a US thing perhaps.

I had a Corrola ST that used an anchor, ejected from the trunk, as an E-brake. Never figured out why it was named after a cigar.

On medium duty trucks that do not have air brakes, the emergency brake was commonly installed on the back of the transmission. We had one fire truck that had this setup. When the truck chassis was modified for the fire pump install, the driveshaft is cut and the fire pump transmission is installed there. The company had included a locking device for the standard foot brakes to keep it in place while pumping. BUT, you could not get the drivers to stop pulling up on the original parking brake and then engaging the pump. Well, the pump would not spin until the throttle was hit hard to overcome the parking brake. Burned up the parking brake band time after time. Finally had to move the parking brake assembly to the back of the water pump transmission.

I know that the oil-soaked band brake on a 51' Plymouth, if left on, will require a fire truck to put out the fire.