Strange noise
 

Hey guys. I'm hoping y'all might be able to help me diagnose a weird sound. I have a 2004 mountaineer that's RWD that's making this odd rhythmic "thrum thrum thrum" kind of sound from the passenger front wheel well. The sound tempo increases with speed as opposed to engine RPM and is worse on right hand turns. On left hand turns, the sound seems to be absent. I did a brake job about a month ago, replacing the rotors and pads. I looked into the wheel well with the wheel turned all the way to the right to see if the tire may be rubbing against something, but it doesn't seem to be. Any ideas? :iono:

Wheel hub.
Jack up that wheel. Put your hands at 12 & 6 and shake. If you have any play, its bad

Does the steering wheel shake or vibrate when the noise is occurring?

^ I was going to mention the same thing; sounds like the passenger bearing. It's a problem on the Tacomas, esp the front passenger side.

I was thinking the same. I actually have at least two occurrences on different cars with passenger side wheel hub, and the symptom is almost the same.

I did not know the way to diagnose, though. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that later today

no, but the noise can be felt through the floor.

Just jacked up the truck and wiggled both front wheels. it's definitely a bad wheel hub on the driver's side. Thanks for the info!

And now I managed to limp it back home from the auto parts store. On the way home, the hub seems to have totally nuked itself and possibly took a brake line with it. A half mile from home the truck started lurching from side to side and it took mashing the brake pedal all the way to the floor to get it to slow. Fortunately I was only doing 15-20mph. and when I got out, there was blue smoke coming from the hub.

Wow. That is serious. Are you going to post some worn out hub picture?

Yea pics! Would be awesome.

haha, I didn't even think about that. I got the new hub installed and the truck is running fine now. Apparently the brake issue was due to boiling the brake fluid when the hub started cocking back to the point where the pads were in constant contact with the rotor. The blue smoke was from the grease that was on the over heated rotor. Looks like I'll have to flush the brake fluid and get the rotor turned if the brakes don't firm back up any more.

I'll go out in a bit and get a picture of the old hub since it's sitting on top of my scrap parts pile waiting for a run to the scrap yard.

Here's the nuked wheel hub. The globs of grease clinging to it are full of metal shavings.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-y...2/DSC01247.JPG
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-p...2/DSC01248.JPG

Thanks for the picture. :coolpics:

Does it take long for you to remove the wheel hub? It seems that after you got the rotor off, there are three nuts that you need to remove for the wheel hub. Is this correct?

Thanks.:thanks:

Yeah, I was surprised that it was actually easier than doing a brake job since you don't have to fiddle with depressing caliper pistons and worming the new pads into place, bleeding the brakes, etc. once you have the caliper and rotor off, it's just three bolts that slide through the back of the spindle and thread directly into the wheel hub and disconnecting the ABS wire from under the hood. The most time I spent was cracking those three bolts loose. I'm just glad it's not a 4WD model, otherwise I would have to have gone through the pain of dealing with the drive axle, too.