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I pulled the whole section of carpet. There's 2 pieces, attached with a piece of sheetmetal. According to my copy of the PET, it's parts #9 & #10 on illustration 807-05. This is the "carpet" page, not the "handbrake" page. It was easier for me to take both of them out together than try and separate them.
There's several small screws.
What I did was pull up gently to see where it was attached. Each spot were it was attached had a screw head hiding under the carpet nap.
Yep. That is the more convenient way of doing it. But I have never needed to work on the handbrake. So what you find & fix, please document it with a lot of pictures.
Will do. Tomorrow I will just take out that carpet so I can get to it properly. I always avoid taking out stuff that's in my way to "save time," and end up costing myself time. I need to stop that lol.
Btw...I need to get this hand brake fixed ASAP or there's going to be a disaster. I can see it coming, and I almost did it this evening. My drive is a bit of an incline, so I'm parking it in gear right now, but if I want to start the car and pop the hood to look at something (see overheating thread) I have to put something behind the rear wheels. I ALMOST removed that without going back in and putting it in gear, when the pizza guy showed up. Exactly the kind of stupid thing I will actually do, if I don't fix this!
I know my mother in law has a very steep driveway. She cannot disengage her handbrake if it is pulled very hard. So she pulls it just for a placebo effect. I have told her if she does not put the car in 1st gear when she parks, her car will end up on the road.
She has a Honda civic.
Basically, I now understand how the mechanism works, which made the problem obvious. For those of you who know this already, the problem was essentially stripped threads on the button, allowing it to fall out, and the spring as well. The long spring just keeps the button "unpushed," but the button itself, when screwed onto the threaded end of the rod inside the handle, along with the spring, pulls the rod, which pushes the pawl against the toothed element. So with no spring/button combo to pull the rod out, there was no tension keeping the pawl against the teeth, so nothing would latch. Simple! If that's not clear, see below.
From the WSM, this shows the parts. I couldn't figure out what was pushing that pawl against the teeth, once I figured out it was the rod (12) being pulled by the button/spring, it all made sense.
You can see the pawl here, hanging down loose, which was my problem.
10-25-2014, 08:50 PM
If that's not clear, see below. 
