Rear brake not working. Help please.

[DSMsamurai666]

First off, I just lost my Haynes manual otherwise I probably wouldn't need to ask for help here. After an hour of literally tearing my house apart trying to find that that thing, here's my problem. For a while I've heard this scraping noise coming from my rear driver's side wheel and I know the brake isn't working on that wheel cause I can see the rotor is rusting. I just took off the wheel and there is this really thick wire resting on the axle and it has been half chewed through cause of the axle rubbing on it. That tells me what the scraping is, but what is this wire and why don't my brakes work? The wire runs along the big metal beam coming from the center of the car and goes to the caliper. It has a metal bracket of some sort at the end of it. It looks like its supposed to be attached to the caliper but it was just resting on it. Sorry if thats a vague discription. I don't know any technical terms for this stuff.

 

[LTUDSM]

Thats prob your brake line.its snaped and thats why your rear caliper is not working.But if your line is stil attached to your caliper,then the caliper itself is stuck....

 

[eeeewidner]

That sounds like a parking brake cable. It's not going to affect the base brake performance if it is disconnected. I would be more concerned on why your rotors are corroded. Try opening up the bleeder valve and see if you have fluid there. If so change your caliper......

 

[brownfinger]

Take out the slider pins. If you can. They are siezed. Maybe the little rubber boots on them are torn. If you can withdraw the slider pins, and the little rubber boots are OK, then clean the rust and dried up grease off of the slider pins. Clean out the cavity you withdrew the pins from. Grease them all back up with a high-quality grease, make sure the rubber boots are seated properly, and reassemble. Often that is all that is needed in a case where a shop would try to sell you a new caliper.
When you have the pins out/caliper off, check the inside face of the rotor. When a caliper siezes, the backside of the rotor gets trashed, and the outside face looks OK. That's because the piston is acting on only one side of the disc.
I'd think the thing rubbing on your axle is the parking brake cable. A little detective work should reveal to you where the cable should be attached to things to keep it off of the axle.

 

[juanpac0]

+1 on the slider pins, if I were you I'd just try to pick up some new calipers though, would probably save you some time.