This content was originally posted by a Car Throttle user on our Community platform and was not commissioned or created by the CT editorial team. It’ll take half as much time to wear the spring out than it would normally. If you push the button everytime you pull the handbrake you will cut the life of the return spring in half. You should let the ratchet mechanism do it’s work and use the button only when necessary (= to release the handbrake). From this we can conclude that you SHOULDN’T push the button when pulling the handbrake. What’s best, pushing or not pushing the button when you pull the handbrake? If we don’t want our mechanism to wear out we want to put as little force on the spring as possible, because big changes in force is what makes the spring wear out. It will start to happen occasionaly but after a few months it will happen most of the time. If this happens less force is forcing the pawl between the teeth of the ratchet bracket and the mechanism will start failing to lock. Heres a simple one for starters HandBrake makes it trivially easy to rip a movie file.

Taking 30 gigs worth of files and making them. But when the metal is fatigued there’s less resistance to deforming and the spring will lose some, of it’s compression. I use handbrake because I dont always go right into the editing room and sometimes we share footage around. A spring is based on metal’s resistance to deforming. The metal litteraly gets tired and will deform pretty easily. When a changing force acts on metal you get fatigue. But in most cases it’s this spring that’s causing the problems. When handbrakes don’t lock anymore people immediately think of the ratchet. The return spring behind the release button is the real culprit.

Handbrake use