79-85 Eldorado Rear calipers with Built in E-brake pull down.

[Benny63]

Hello everyone.

I'm a newbie here. I have reading around many forums about issues with the 79-85 Eldorado Rear Calipers with built in E-brake. I have just purchased a set and had an issue with the left side E-brake not adjusting so I decided to make a few videos on how I fixed my problem. Hope the videos can help someone else.

https://youtu.be/fu4bACX8NKc

Happy viewing guys.

Benny.

[TJ Hopland]

Very well done video.  You can see all the parts and how they should work.   All the parts is the key word, there are a lot of parts in there that have to stay clean and free to do their thing which is no easy task when they live in brake fluid.   What makes things worse on these besides all the extra parts to go wrong is there are additional seals that can let fluid leak out or air and other contaminants leak in.    If you keep your fluid fresh and regularly drive the car they are not too bad but if the car does a lot of sitting everything in there gets pretty nasty and stuck.   Not using the E brake does not help, the mechanism can still get stuck and cause the brakes to drag which is the problem I see the most.

I have had terrible luck with the reman calipers.   Like his there can be a lot of pitting and such that was not properly cleaned up or just rejected and I have got them with L and R parts swapped.   Because of the popularity of using them for swaps someone is making them new again and they are available from most of the 'hotrod' types of places.   I got a pair of fully loaded (pads, hardware, everything) for not much more than a reman and they worked fine for the 3 years I had the car.

The 76-80ish was larger but basically the same.   The photos don't show all those parts inside the piston so his video really helps you get what is going on inside. 

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[Benny63]

TJ Thank you for your response and also for the breakdown diagram. I've been searching allover for that..lol, I'll be sure to keep that in my files. I really hope the videos will help people and take the fear away from pulling these apart and fixing these simple issue. 

[toukow]

Kudos to both Benny and TJ Hopland. Just bought a 76 Eldorado with a leaky rear caliper, and could not understand exactly how this should work from the shop manual. Per TJ Hopland comments, decided to bite the bullet and replace all the calipers as I know the car has sat a lot and the brake fluid/master cylinder was sludged up big time.

In the scheme of brake calipers, I don't know if I would call these 'relatively simple', but then again, I'm the one having the trouble understanding them!  I have never worked on any brakes of this design, and this information was very informative. Thanks, Toukow

[TJ Hopland]

Glad I could contribute.   Benny did do a nice job on that video which really helps understand what is going on in there.