Sorry this has taken so long, as I had all the picture for this last summer. But here it is, complete instruction on restoring your sticky bellcranks.
I have also added complete instructions on adjusting the parking brake system along with adjusting the rear brake shoes. This all go's hand in hand.
Mike

Mike, this is an absolutely fantastic writeup. I have seen professional manuals which were not as well written. Great work! I have the drooping emergency brake cable blues, and this will make the repair very straightforward. You have my heartfelt thanks.

- Chris

Your quit welcome Chris! :peace:
Mike

I fixed my bellcranks this weekend. I couldn't have done it without Mike's fantastic writeup. The text was great, and the pictures were invaluable once I took everything apart, mixed up all the parts, and read in the writeup that there were different left and right assemblies. :)

The first drum cover popped off easily with the two 8mm bolts. On the second drum cover, I stripped out the threaded hole - or so I thought. It turns out I just stripped out the soft hardware store bolts I bought. So I went back to the store and bought two more. I added some anti-seize to the threads, sprayed more PB Blaster at the hub interface, hit the drum cover several times with a dead blow hammer, and proceeded to try again. The cover came about 2mm further off before those two bolts stripped out too. My wife was out grocery shopping at the time, so I called her and had her bring 8 more bolts back with her. This time I put some naval jelly along the hub interface where the corrosion had built up. By the time my wife came back, the naval jelly had eaten enough rust away from both sides that the cover came right off.

Disassembling the bellcranks was very straightforward with the writeup. Both pin C clips were so heavily corroded that they crumbled away. I also had a problem with one of the heavily corroded pins and really had to beat the heck out of it with a hammer and punch to get it out. I sat the bracket on a large impact socket so that the pin head was sitting in the socket opening. This gave me a good firm surface to hammer on but allowed the pin to be punched out. I found that using a finish nail hammer actually worked better with a punch than a framing hammer - it seemed to bounce less and transmitted a sharper force. I used some E-clips and stainless steel washers from the hardware store to reassemble the pivot pins.

Reassembly was interesting. I played with the star adjuster to learn how it worked. I saw how pulling the parking brake arm ratcheted the adjuster forwards. I decided to back up the adjusters (MUCH easier from inside than through the access hole!) so the drum cover easily slid on over the shoes. The drum covers weren't sliding on easily due to remaining corrosion on the hub. I realized this was probably because I was putting the cover back on in a different orientation than it came off, and so the pattern of corrosion/ridges were different. I used an impact gun and the lug nuts to gently snug the lugnuts against the cover in a round-robin pattern to pull the cover tight. I reassembled everything, put the wheels on, and dropped the truck on the ground to give it a test drive.

The first thing I noticed was the brakes were really soft. I was rolling slightly backwards down my driveway and hit the emergency brake - absolutely nothing. Repeated attempts to engage and disengage the brake resulted in absolutely nothing. I pulled the truck back in the garage, rolled under the back end, and began actuating the e-brake lever by hand on each side. (This is easier if you remove the springs so you are not working against them.) When pulling the lever back each time, I could hear the click of the star wheel ratcheting. I kept pulling the arm dozens of times until I no longer heard the click. I put the rear axle of the truck up on jackstands, but found that even when I pulled the arms all the way back, the wheels still spun.

So as others have observed on the forum, sometimes the auto-adjust mechanism does not get you far enough to have firm brake engagement. At this point I grabbed a flathead offset screwdriver (http://images.google.com/images?q=offset%20screwdriver). This screwdriver is absolutely perfect for adjusting the star wheel through the access hole. Just put the blade in the hole, move the screwdriver forward towards the front of the vehicle until the screwdriver is against the front side of the access window, and pivot the blade downward. You'll get right on the teeth every time with no worries about stripping the star wheel from hitting it at a funny angle. I adjusted each side probably a good 20 more clicks until pulling the e-brake arm out about 1cm started to engage the emergency brake. At this point, I put the springs and rubber plugs back, dropped the truck on the ground, and tested the e-brake. Perfect!

Now that I know what to do, I will include parking brake adjustment with the offset screwdriver as a part of routine maintenance.

Mike, thanks again!

- Chris

Glad you goter fixed up. :rolleyes::tu:
Mike

Hi the pictures don't seem to be in the PDF that I opened. Does somebody have a copy with the pictures?

Update: Did the bellcranks today. Write up was great. Took them out cleaned them up, painted, and lubed them. Better than new. I replaced the drums and shoes while I was there.

Just one thing, the bellcrank levers were absolutely fused together with salt and rust. I used 3/4 of a can of PB Blaster soaked then and got them apart. Packed em with hi temp silicone grease. The saggy PB cable is tight across the diff again! Whoo Hoo!

Thanks for a great write up!

FYI.. they're 56.00 a piece at my dealer. Was going to repair, but the one is pretty bad. I do enjoy "extra" time in the garage... LOL!

Gosh, I love this site !

Yesterday, I encountered my drooping parking cable on the passenger side just as pictured in your .PDF.

A twist, for anybody who is interested; It is 20 degrees out in Michigan and I wasn't too jiggy about performing the whole tear down, rehab process in this weather. Not taking anything away from your corrective action- give me a 60 degree day and I would have done it exactly as you described. What I did do which freed the crank arm and eliminated the droop was to carefully inject PB Buster into the boot, worked the arm til it moved freely followed by a careful injection of lithium grease. This was quite easy using your basic aerosols and those dandy red aerosol straws. If injected gently there is little risk of the lubricants getting past the base block in to the brake hub. 5 minutes and I was done. Will do your prescribed complete rehab come warmer weather.

What I don't see anybody really saying is that if this arm stays stuck in this position it is causing the parking barke shoe to stay in hard contact with the brake drum, wearing out brake parts, killing fuel economy..... this easy, not exactly temporary, fix addresses the urgency of the failure.

I'm going to try to attach an image of what I am talking about.

Thanks very much for the writeup, Mike.

Scoob

I have some droop in my cable(to the passenger side drum), but there is no space between the bolt and housing indicating that the bellcrank is stuck. I did lift the rubber boots on both sides and spray some aero-kroil in there. Then, I engaged and disengaged the parking brake multiple times. Now it seems that the parking brake pedal goes down farther and much easier than before. The cable running to the passenger side doesn't droop as much now, but as I mentioned, there wasn't a space on either side that would indicate problems with the bellcranks. Maybe I need to adjust the cable behind the pedal?

There's a cable adjustment on the driver side framerail.

where is the best place to buy replacement bell cranks, cheapest dealer..? i have them apart, but they are warped and rusted..

I found this with a Google search. Excellent write-up! One side was corroded to the point that all I could save was the bellcrank. The other side was the way it left the assembly line. Quite the difference between the inside of the boot and the outside.

i did this on my truck a few months ago,.. was awesome.. but no im having issues again, so i need to take a look.. i replaced a bunch of parts, but i thk they are adjusted well again

I previously repaired my bellcranks back in 2009. Well, they're seized up again. I ordered a complete kit with all parts from Ebay (search for "Tundra bellcrank") to R&R everything. Mike's writeup will still be a big help for walking me through the R&R!

GREAT write-up!

I had an 80 PU, two 88's, and a 99 Taco. ALL were the same design, and I had to do this AT LEAST every other year on them (Western NY winters are heck, with all the salt.)

I just have two points to add.

BEFORE removing the drums, it might be a good idea, especially if they are old, or you live in the rust belt, to adjust the brakes as shown in the write-up. But instead of tightening them up, you want to LOOSEN them (drawing the shoes IN away from the drum, and toward the hub.)

On old, or especially rusty drums, with pad and drum surface wear, you can get a "lip" that forms on the inner edge of the drum. I've seen some of mine about 1/8" thick. If you dont draw the shoes in before trying to pull the drum, the shoes may catch on this lip, making it MUCH harder to get the drums off, and bending some of the brake hardware & possibly cracking or breaking off some of the pad material, trashing the shoes if you were planning on reusing them.

And if you have lots of rust/corrosion under the dust boot on the base or bellcrank, and no sandblaster at your disposal, a wire wheel on a drill or angle grinder will do a decent job. Not much you can do with the slot in the base that the arm fits through, other than to use a flatfile slightly thinner than the slot, and run that through it. If you dont have one thin enough, steal an nail file from your significant other when she isnt looking, and use that. Just dont get too aggressive, and make sure the file stays even in the slot, so you dont widen the ends of the slot, or make the slot crooked on one side. Just a few passes should work. Remember, the base is a SOFT alloy. WASH the slot out GOOD if you use a file or emery board, you gotta make sure you get all the sand & shavings out of there, before lubing it.

Also, if your bellcranks are crudded up, more than likely the bellcrank/adjusting arm up on the side of the frame under the driver's seat is also froze up, or out of adjustment from either rust, or trying to use the e-brakes while the rear bellcranks are frozen up. So make sure when you do the rears, ALWAYS check this arm too. It's a perfect time to check it and lube it since you already have the cables disconnected from the back.

When you get the rears put all back together, adjust the E-brake lever in the cab FIRST, THEN the front bellcrank second, THEN adjust the rears LAST.....Kind of the same idea as bleeding brakes from the furthest wheel cylinder away from the cylinder, to get the slack out of the system from front to back.
No point in getting the rears adjusted properly, if there is slack or too much tightness further up the cable.

I know this is old, but due to how much money, time, and frustration your amazing write-up saved me I had to say THANK YOU!!! what a huge help. I can't believe they want $170+ for that little and simple assembly! Good as new now! Thank you again!

Mike this is an excellent write up. I did not see this write up when looking to do this earlier in the year.
I began to write up my own instructions to share, but since this is no longer necessary I have listed the required parts for a late model 2003 Tundra below.

After failing to obtain the required parts or assemblies from my local Toyota dealers, I eventually found a source online to obtain the individual parts required to completely rebuild the armature assemblies. There may be others, but ToyotaPartsZone.com had every part. The only downside is that they are located in California and do not ship other than UPS ground (truck coast to coast).
If you decide not to clean and reuse your p-brake parts, you will need the following. These part numbers are for a 2003 Tundra. Some part numbers will vary between 2000 – 2002 and 2003 – 2004. If you plug in your VIN when using ToyotaPartsZone, it will only display parts applicable to your specific truck based on its manufacture date.
The quantity listed assumes you are repairing both right and left assemblies.

Parts:
47624-60030 Crank, Parking Brake QTY 1
47625-60030 Crank, Parking Brake QTY 1
47628-35020 Bracket, Bellcrank QTY 2
90213-06013 Washer, Type C QTY 2
90249-08068 Pin QTY 2
47616-35030 Wire, Parking Brake QTY 2
47633-35020 Boot, Rear Brake Bellcrank QTY 2*

* Replace the rubber boots on the armatures if they are cracked, otherwise they may be reused. Age alone may be enough reason to replace them as they may tear or crack when removed or reinstalled.

Good luck all. :)
- Max

Another great write up!! Thanks!