the handbrake on my 92 maxima isnt working. 2 months ago i did a pretty big slide and i thought my brakes cut out or something so my reflexes cut in and i yanked the handbrake, nothing. i thought the handbrake did work, and i just slid more and thats why it never stopped me

for the heck of it today i thought i would try and see if it works, and i went slow and yanked it, nothing. tried sitting on a small slope and yanking it to see if it would stop the car, nothing

the guy before me babied the car so i know it was never yanked excessively for drifting or stuff like that. any reason why its not working? the only thing i can think of is when i got my JVC H/U installed, the guys put my handbrake on when they were installing it and when i drove away i never noticed and i drove with the handbrake cranked for about 5-10 seconds

 

hmm..

how much resistance is there to the handbrake lever? can you lift it with one finger? do you actually have to pull on it? are your rear brakes drums or discs?

 

theres not really much resistance, i could lift it with one finger. im not sure about the rear brakes, i'll have to check

 

no offense dude but you should sort of know what kind of rear brakes you have

anyhow.. i'm thinking it's either way way out of adjustment, or you have a broken ebrake cable. once you figure out what sort of rear brakes you have, we'll help you figure out to check for a broken cable

hopefully you have discs.. that'll make it easier to check.

 

rofl, yeah, i know

if the cables broken, would it be alot to get repaired? its a automatic so the handbrake isnt really needed so if its gonna be a pricey fix i might not get it fixed

 

went out to put the Club on my steering wheel, and i tried the handbrake and i could lift it with my pinkie even. i remember back when i was taking driving lessons for my license, the guy took me into the stadium parking lot late at night and taught me how to drift (being his last student FTW) and the handbrake on that toyota coralla was about triple as hard to crank as my maxima right now

 

first, is it drum or disc? i have some good condition ebrake cables for drum brakes leftover after i did my rear disc swap. if you have discs then it's still something you can do yourself, you'll just have to find the cables at a JY tho. Installation is much easier on disc brakes than drum brakes but still quite possible either way. On drums you have to take the drum and shoes off to get to the parking brake lever mechanism. On discs you just undo one bolt, wiggle the little bracket off and swap the cables.

either way, count on breaking about half the exhaust heatshield bolts you remove, simply due to it being more likely for your underbody fasteners to be rusted since you live in canada. even in the southern US i still broke half of those bolts on my car due to minor rust on those bolts.

 

OILERS!!! lol....dude first u gotta check wat u have back dere

 

you just need to do basic mechanics. Take apart the console and make sure it is still connected at the lever. Keep tracing back untill you find the problem. A FSM comes it real handy since you can see diagrams of what is where and you can trace the parts.

 

I'd climb under the rear of the car and make sure the cables are still connected to the rear brake.
My purple 4th gen had the cables disconnected from both rear calipers, So I could pull the lever with a pinky.

 

Pray that you dont have to replace the cables...they're not hard but just bla, I replaced mine when I did my rear disc swap and I broke just about every 10mm bolt that held the cable brackets in place. That same cable snapped nearly a year ago and I've got a replacement for it but been too lazy.

Whether you have drums or disc, they run about 80 bucks each at the dealer. There are 3 pieces so you'll need to determine which one you need and you might be able to find one from someone here or at a junk yard.

 

ive been gone all day and havent been able to check my brakes, but i can tomorrow

i tried again today, and the handbrake worked about 1 out of 4 times i tried it, so im guessing its just needing some tweaking or adjusting