Brian -
Couple of possibilities on that Maxima:
1) You have to, as you suspected, screw the piston back into the caliper.
There may be a couple of spanner notches on the piston which will be your
clue there.
2) On some Japanese rear calipers manufactured by Showa (used by Mazda,
Nissan, and probably others), there's a hex-head screw along the centerline
of the piston bore, on the back side of the caliper, next to the line
connection. This is usually either an 10mm or a 12mm, depending on which
caliper size it is. Remove that screw, and there's a hex key socket
(sorry, can't remember the correct Allen wrench size, I think 6mm on the
larger calipers, but I'm not sure). Turn that the right way and it'll pull
the piston back in. This is also how you adjust them after you put the new
brake pads on, otherwise you'll be working the parking brake handle like
crazy trying to get the pads back out to the rotor hard enough to be
useable. Be sure to put the hex head screw back in after you're done.
Adjusting one of these is easy -- I remount the wheel and tire, and tighten
them up until I can't spin the wheel by hand. Back off about 1/4 turn of
the adjuster and that's it. If you do it right, the hand brake will be
about 1/2 to 2/3 of its travel when the parking brake is fully engaged --
enough to keep the car from rolling on a pretty substantial slope.
I got pretty good at doing these -- the parking brake cable lever turns a
shaft that tends to rust into its bore in the caliper casting. No repair
procedure or parts are available, so you wind up replacing the calipers
with remanufactured units semi-regularly after the p-brake sticks on and
cooks a set of pads and the rotor. I could do a pair of rear calipers,
rotors, pads, and bleed the brakes in about 40 minutes -- slightly more if
the rear rotors shrink-fit themselves to the hub pilot (like one on John
McIver's ex-Danny Shields MX-6 did one time) and I had to get out the heavy
equipment: a 1-ton come-along to secure the car to the wall opposite so I
wouldn't knock it off the jackstands and a 12-lb dead-blow hammer to knock
the rotor loose on the hub. I didn't want to hot-wrench it because the hub
bearings were just fine and heating things up with the torch would've
required replacing the hub assembly, too (which I didn't have handy).
Jim Crider
jac73@dcx.com
|