How easy is it to tighten the hand brake on my voyager? I believe it to be a self adjusting one, I have tried reversing at low speed and applying the hand brake a number of times, which in the short term works then goes slack again, MOT due in a month and having spent a lot of money already on other problems prefer to have a go myself! Any advice please?

 

What year is your Voyager? and have you got a full drum rear brakes or disc rear brakes with a small drum just for hand brake? my 2005 has disc with small drum, and the only way I have found to adjust mine is by the small adjuster that you get to through the bottom of the back plate under the car

 

2003, full drum rear brakes?

 

On my old 2001 Chrysler Grand Voyager Limited that had the full drum brake had a handbrake lever that went up all of the clicks and would still not hold, so I put new shoes in and still no good handbrake, so I put new all three parts of the handbrake cable and then went on in 3 clicks, so check your brake shoes, if they are fine replace all of the handbrake cable

 

Also, I don't believe these are self-adjusting, at least last time I had mine apart, found a manual adjuster that you have to get at through a tiny hole from under the car (Using a screwdriver with a curved+flattened bit was the end trick).

I found mine in quite a bad state so needed a lot of TLC free'ing them up and then setting correctly.

There was another issue in that the spring inside the hand-brake inside the car itself was also loosing its tension causing it not to grip as well on the cable, therefore not applying as much pull/pressure on it, so might be worth having a look there too maybe?

 

Like andyb, I've just done mine, they are the worst design I've ever seen in 70 years of drum brakes. So bad that Chrysler have a bulletin out on the poor design. All shoes have small parts sets that are clogged with rust & shoe dust after only one winter. The design fault allows ingress of salt and snow each winter adding to the mix. Scruffy mechanics almost never ever grease & clean out the compacted brake dust. I had to use 'heat' to free off the rusted cam where it came through the unprotected back plate.

My advice is do them right once, after 13 years they'll thank you for it.. Use lots of aerosol copperslip on the moving parts. Its not a big deal, I'm lucky I have several friends with garage ramps but a quiet hour or so on stands somewhere safe and a coffee or two will get the hand-braking % up and importantly keep it up for years.

Best of luck.

 

I had a problem with loose hand brake cables on a 1998 Voyager. I had some slack of the cables and initialy tried to add some spacers to take up the slack. I found the problem to be a rusty part which is inside the drum at the top of the brake shoes. The part that has a small arm exiting the drum and which the cable is connected to. The arm was completely stuck due to rust and after treatment with rust remover everything worked as normal. I also found that the brake handle itself is selfadjusting on my car. The cable connection drum inside the handle is spring loaded to take up slack. Normally the drum can move freely and the spring maintains the cable tension at maximum. Once the handle is lifted, already before the first click, there is another spring system that locks the cable drum so that it moves together with the handle and keeps the cable tight..