On a 993 or really any 964 or earlier 911 the parking lever is used every time the car is parked. As the parking brake shoes wear incrementally over many years the lever must be raised incrementally higher in its travel to lock the parking brakes. As the lever requires a longer pull it becomes ergonomically harder to pull it and the mechanical leverage it applies to the parking brake seems to diminish. I never noticed this change as it happens very slowly over many years. However, my wife was going to drive the Porsche and complained she didn't have the strength to release the parking brake once I had pulled it up.
Turns out adjusting the parking brake lever is very easy:
First, one removes the back top section of the between-the-seat console. If your car has the plain cup, labeled "10" in the illustration below, just remove the rubber pad in the bottom of the cup and unscrew the two Phillips screws to release it. It takes a little jiggling of the cup back and forth to allow it to come free. If your car has one of the optional Tape or CD holders the screws are still there but it will take a little investigation to see how to release the holders to get to them as I do not have either of these in my car.
Once the cup is removed it exposes the cable saddle, labeled "24" in the above illustration, attached to the brake lever and the two cables leading the rear brakes. There are two nuts one to adjust the take-up slack on the cables to the wheel ends, the other being a jam-nut against it to hold it from slipping.
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| Jam & Adjusting nut location. |
Release the adjusting nut from the jam-nut using two open-end box wrenches. As you tighten up the adjustment nut trial pull on the brake lever. In my case, I tightened it up to the point where when the lever's ratchet clicked 4 times before I began to feel some resistance from the brake cables through the lever. The key here is to NOT tighten the nut too much so the parking brake is always partially engaged as this will create heat in the rear wheel hubs and wear the brake shoe linings, both very undesirable conditions.
Once adjusted re-snug the jam-nut against the adjusting nut and button things up. It took me all of five minutes to do this adjustment & as they say happy wife happy life!
Adjusting the Emergency/Parking Bake after replacing the brake shoes:
The brake shoes are extremely long-wearing. I checked mine on my previous '86 Carrera at 150K miles and found they still had plenty of lining. However if one is going to replace the parking brake shoes, or simply wants to readjust the shoe clearance at the wheel ends when the wheels are off for other reasons here is the factory document on how to adjust them::
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