morning sleepy
first, the Aleros e-brake is a "drum in hat" design. Quite common if u look for good brake values, easy maintenance and price.
a drum brake has a extremely good advantage over disc brakes - thats why it was used on cars. The english wiki articel is lacking this main feature - "Selbstverstärkung" - which means that the brake shoes grabs harder / better than u would normally think. That is thanks to the circular motion the hat does around the shoes. If u apply the brake the shoe gets pulled with the hat - hence braking better than the brake force u applied with ur foot or the lever.
Due to the contstruction of the Alero e-brake this self enforcing characteristic is, sadly, only given in the forward motion of the car. Haven this self-enforcing in both ways is extremely difficult to achieve.
How u adjust the e-brake.
first of, check if all 3 of the brake cables move smoothly. - this is vital in the Alero brake system
than, spread the shoes so far that u feel and hear drag as u put on the hat. Depending on the milage it can get pretty tough to get the hat on/off and have the shoes drag.
here u will also see that forward spinning the wheel has more drag than backwards.
than u pull the lever a few times - at half way pulled the brakes on both sides should be rock solid.
here cheap rotors make life hard as u deform the rotor by pulling - hence u can pull the lever all the way up. (learned this the hard way)
if u have have good rotos (hat) and after some pulls the lever way is still extreme.
go back and spread the shoes 1 or 2 clicks further. getting the brakes on/off is now almost impossible (spinning back and forth helps getting the hat off)
take out ur console and look at the mechanic of the lever.
the automatic mechanics can be adjusted slightly. -- have to get the drawings and describtion before I write something here about that.