A few decades ago, Cadillac engineers came up with a clever way to integrate a parking brake into vehicles equipped with rear disc brakes.
Instead of putting a little pair of brake shoes inside the rotor’s top hat like other rear-disc cars (namely, the Corvette), the Cadillac caliper uses a spring-assisted lever that manually pushes the caliper piston against the pad, clamping it to the rotor to hold the wheel.
Suffice it to say, Cadillac’s approach was much less complex than a setup like the aforementioned Corvette. As a result, these Caddy-style parking brake setups are popular retrofits and upgrades, particularly for the off-road crowd.
But these calipers do need to be precisely adjusted to make sure they bleed properly and work as intended.
That’s why we’re glad we came across this video from the folks at Classic Performance. It’ll go through how to adjust the parking brake on a brake caliper modeled after those earlier Cadillac-style ones.
Though this walkthrough uses Classic Performance brake system parts, the process is pretty similar to others. Check it out:
Trying to adjust the Cadillac style calipers, I’ve watched the videos and read the online instructions but it will not adjust the parking brake, the lever is almost at full forward position before the brake is engaged no matter what I try, either I’m doing something wrong or i have a bad new caliper, any suggestions would be helpful