2000 – 2005 Volvo V70 Parking Brake

Ok, so let’s see:

1. Symptom
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine went down to Italy for a trip in his 2003 EU spec Volvo V70. (The 2.4 5cyl). The car had roughly 180.000 km / 110.000 miles on the odo.
While they were down there, he said he noticed the brakes making funny scratching sounds. After a while, they started sticking after releasing the hand brake. Eventually, while backing up, they heard a loud clang from the back, like something just broke. After that, there was quite a bit of noise in the left rear wheel housing.

2. Diagnosis
It seems like there is a common problem with V70 and S60 parking brakes. The actual pad material likes to come off and get stuck somewhere in there. So I took it to our nice rental garage around the corner, took of the rear left rotor, and found this:

It seems that very thing happened. Actually, when I took off the rotor, the lower part of the hand brake pad lining fell right out onto my feet. So I ordered a new one and will install new after market hand brake pads on there.