My fix for the Infamous parking brake failure!

[lugnut1009]

I recently had to do a lot of work on my wife's F3 and wanted to share my findings since I wasn't able to find much when I was searching myself. I understand a lot of people take their bikes to the dealer when it gets past minor repairs or maintenance, but that's about all I found was "took it to dealer and they replaced the parking brake motor". I dove into this myself, and while I didn't take any pictures, I wanted to share my experience anyway in case it could help someone else in the future.

Back story if interested, if not skip to next paragraph:
This all started with a simple brake fluid change out and pad replacement. First problem I encountered was a failed rear caliper (seems snap ring popped out of the threaded portion internal to the caliper while attempting to press and thread the piston back into the caliper) which cost me over $500 and a couple weeks of down time. After that fiasco, put the new caliper on and the master cylinder goes to leaking! I think the vacuum brake bleeder I was using took out an already worn seal in the master cylinder. So another $320+ for that and another 2 weeks down. This time I bled the brakes the old manual way with my wife as the pedal pusher. Finally success!! Or so we thought. So now the electric parking brake won't move or even make any attempt to move at all.

Parking brake failure:
Ok so I removed the side panel and disconnected the bullet connectors going to the parking brake motor. I measured voltage with the motor disconnected and the bike is sending 12v to the motor in both directions which obviously tells me it's the motor. I removed the motor, just three screws that are horrible to get to, and removed from the bike. By this point you will realize this motor is very similar to an '80's automobile electric window motor. I took it apart and couldn't really find anything wrong. The only thing I noticed was the brushes were worn funny, and there is absolutely no lubrication in there. So I applied just a little grease, reassembled, and tested with an old battery I happen to keep in my shop on tender. Worked great! So I reinstalled and the brake works as it should. But due to the motor brushes being worn I'm going to order a new one.

Long story short, if you have 60k miles on your bike, it sits up for a month and the parking brake motor doesn't want to work for the first time ever, just buy a new one... They aren't hard to replace just expensive ($210+), like everything else on this bike.