Prius (2010-12) :: Grinding Noise Near The Front Axle
Feb 5, 2011
So I was driving yesterday and I hear a grinding noise near the front axle. I pull over and a plastic panel is hanging off near the front of the car. I go to the family mechanic to have him put it back on, and since one of the clips are missing, he tells me to go to the dealer to get a clip and have them fasten the panel.
This morning I go to the dealership. The service advisor gets me right on a lift and comes back about 20 minutes later with a slip of paper. He tells me that the piece is the door from the under body plastic protection that protects the oil reservoir. There are no sides of it that seem to have been ripped off a larger piece, just holes to be screwed in. He tells me the whole entire piece needs to be replaced, end of story. He did not offer warranty coverage (I have 20K on the car) and was not interested in speaking to me further on the topic. The parts desk pulled up a diagram of the car and showed me the panel as part of one big piece underneath that needs to be replaced.
I am going to seek out another dealership on this, but I wanted to pose this to you all as well. First, do I even need to replace this small piece of thin plastic? Second, if I do, can I buy just this small piece and not the entire under body panel. I noticed some threads about the poor design of the oil door, and perhaps this is what this is? I do not have access to a floor jack or garage, so all of my service (free toyota care) has been done at this specific dealership. Here is a pic of the piece.
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Wife's 2010 F150 4x4 85000 KMs makes grinding / ratcheting noise in LH front axle when in 2 wheel drive. Mostly when turning left some times when traveling straight never when turning right. Never makes the noise when in four wheel drive. I am suspecting the auto hub is the issue but wonder if others have had this trouble ?
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I am in the process of replacing the front hub seals so my ESOF works again. I tested both front hubs with a mityvac and neither one of them holds any vacuum at all. All the lines are good, and the pump and solenoid seem to be working fine.
I have the driver's side apart and I have a couple of questions.
What's a good source for the vacuum seal? I've checked rockauto, riff raff, and diesel o-rings. Diesel o-rings has it, but the description says it's only for 2003+ Excursions so I didn't order it.
There is no yellow o-ring anywhere on the hub. I assume that someone forgot to put this o-ring back in and this is why I don't have ESOF? I guess what I really want to know is that there isn't some 2000-specific thing where there's no o-ring, right?
After I got the hub off, I spun it around on my workbench and it doesn't sound good at all. It makes a slight metallic grinding noise about 1/2 way around. I assume this isn't normal? AFAIK these are all original parts - but the missing o-ring means to me that someone already had it apart.
There was a lot of water intrusion and rusty colored grease but nothing was dry, the needle bearings were intact and the shaft isn't scored at all where the bearing rides. I'm hoping new seals and good cleaning and it should be good as new. And then it's off to the next side.
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Tonight it was a perfect 72 degrees and I had to run over to a friend's house and pick up my backpack as I didn't feel like riding my bike the ten miles home with that thing on my back. As I usually do when it's nice outside, I opened both front windows and the sunroof and immediately noticed a mid-level pitch grinding noise that comes and goes but is mostly noticeable at low speeds. Initially I thought it was the brakes dragging but it doesn't change with a brake application so I'm guessing it's the front wheel bearings. I'm calling the dealer in the morning to set up a service appointment.
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I have a 2012 Ford Focus which infrequently makes an odd grinding, scratching sound by the front LEFT tire/ axle. It only does it when turning to the RIGHT. It usually does it as I'm coming out of the turn, not into the turn; so when the tire is moving back into the straight position. It's just the sound, you can very slightly feel it when it happens but really no stability or other steering issues. What is causing this sound?
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I've got a 2010 3rd generation Prius II with about 38k miles. Earlier today when I was driving around town the car suddenly started making a sort of grinding sound, metal-on-metal sound.
To cut to the chase, I think I've narrowed it down to something in the front right wheel. When I got home I put the car in park and had someone rev the engine. The sound didn't manifest, so I think this rules out the engine, belts, etc.. It doesn't seem to appear until the car gets moving. Almost right away, even at low speeds, the sound crops up.
I had someone drive the car very slowly down the street as I walked around the car to try to pinpoint the location of the sound, and I'm fairly certain it's coming from the front right wheel. It's present even when driving straight, so it's not strictly related to turning, although it is audible when turning as well.
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I have a 2004 F150, 5.4L V8. A few years back I was in an accident when someone slammed into the front of my truck. The right front wheel & tire took the brunt of the accident. I thought the repair shop had everything back to normal until recently I occasionally have a grinding sound coming from the right front side, seems to be related to the axle. It doesn't do it all the time just at random while I'm driving. The only solution I can find is to pull over or slow my speed to a crawl. Once I slow down enough or turn my wheel one way or the other its like something SLAMS back into place. I had it looked at by a local mechanic and they couldn't find anything wrong. Could it be something in my right front axle?
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Over the past few months I'd noticed an intermittent grinding noise coming from my left front wheel at low speeds. I took it in once but it refused to play along so I finally managed to catch it on camera and let the dealership listen to it. They booked me for today, saying it sounded like a wheel bearing (to which I agreed) and I dropped her off around ten, not expecting it to cooperate for the second time.
I got a call from the dealer around 2 PM saying that they were able to duplicate the noise and that when they took the left front wheel off and ran the car on the lift with the rest of the wheels off the ground, the noise went away. Even stranger still, when they put the wheel on the tire balancing machine and spun it, gronch, gronch...gronch, gronch....gronch, gronch. It was coming from inside the wheel! I gave them permission to dismount the tire from the wheel and about ten minutes later I got another call saying they'd found a handful of tiny hard rubber balls inside the mounted wheel/tire assembly that were rolling down the inside of the wheel and causing the grumbling at low speed.
Here's the kicker: they were in all four wheels! The tech even saved them for me so I could take a look and they don't look like anything mass-produced; some are larger than others, some are round and some are oval-shaped but when I dropped one on the glass advisor desk, it made a very clear 'Clink!'.
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The issue is with my 2000 F350 crew longbed V10. Other than a BTS trans put in a little over a year ago, and FoMoCo motorsports headers, the whole truck is bone stock. Oh, it has that fantastic auto-hub thing with the fake locking hubs and the little switch on the dash (I'd love to convert it to a manual shifter...?). 174k on chassis, so things need to be done, 40k on engine, 3k on BTS 4r100.
Yesterday I was running around town, made a stop, and when I started moving again got a loud grinding from the front axle. Thought maybe I'd picked up a rock in a caliper or something, so I jumped out and checked everything, no joy. Moved forward, there it is again. No vibration, but loud enough (or telegraphing enough) to hear clearly in the cab. Let the truck roll forward, popped in to neutral, noise fades away. Back in to drive, there it is. So, now I know it's trans/t-case/driveshaft/related. I recently put new vacuum lines in, checked all the connections, and pulled, cleaned and lubed the hubs.
And since the trans is a nearly new BTS that is working just find, I'm narrowing the search to the hubs, drive shaft, t-case.
Get home (noise abates above 30mph, or everything else drowns it out), crawl under, and find the front driveshaft is locked. Ok, stuck hub? Pull out both the fake locking hubs, and now the shaft turns. I can turn each front axle by hand at the u-joint, and I kinda hear a faint grinding on the right side (will bad needles make noise only under a load from the trans and not coasting in neutral?), and when I swing the drive shaft around the left axle moves, right doesn't, etc etc.
I'm going to pull the drive shaft today and check the U joints, and drive a bit to see if the noise is still there, but I am thinking I might have some bad needles on the pax side axle...
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My Prius has developed a disturbing noise over the past 2 weeks. I believe the noise is coming from the front, driver's side. The faster I go, the louder the noise. It begins shortly after accelerating and doesn't stop until I stop the car.
I didn't think it was a mechanical noise, but now I'm not sure. I feel a slight vibration in the accelerator pedal while the car is making the noise. I'm wondering if this is something in the axle, wheel bearing, transmission, or what.
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I've got a 2004...it has 90,000 miles. For about the last 5000 miles I've been experiencing - only a few times a month, and totally out of the blue - a grinding noise coming from the front (i think left). This happens when I'm traveling at about 55-58 mph (never at lower speeds). It even happened once when the cruise was set. It gets pretty loud, and i find that if i pull over and stop for a few seconds, then keep going, that it stops. In other words, it seems that breaking to a stop disengages whatever the cause is. Also, no warning lights come on at all...like i said, it happens totally out of the blue. No, it's not the wheel bearing.
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Coming to a left turn signal I was anticipating it turning red on me, and I drove into the turn lane briskly 30mph and then applied brakes as I made a u-turn. It sounded like a cross between dragging the front air dam and metal on metal brake grinding as I made the turn. Stopped immediately and did not scrap the air dam and all front end components checked out, okay. Car is driving just fine now, has only done this once.
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The topic is as much as I can say to what my car's problem is.
2010 Prius II with 50k miles now.
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I leased a 2010 Honda Civic (non-hybrid) in March of 2010. I had to replace the front brake pads at 8K miles, 18.5K miles and now again at 27K miles. Each time, I get a screeching, grinding noise from the driver-side front wheel. At 8K, I went to a dealership (not the one where I got the car) who replaced them for free "as a courtesy" (apparently, brake pads aren't covered under the warranty). At 18.5K, I went to the dealership where I leased the car from; they said that it didn't look like the other dealer had actually performed the work (yet somehow, the screeching noise went away). They charged me $250 to replace the brake pads and buff the rotors. Now, at 27K, the screeching noise has returned. The dealership has warrantied their prior work and isn't charging me. They claim that there is nothing wrong with the braking system. When I asked them why the pads keep going after 9K miles, they said they don't know, and maybe its the way I brake. I do 80+% highway driving and while I do encounter stop and go traffic on a daily basis, I don't think this is normal.
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I have 1999 F350 7.3 Crew Cab 4WD. I took it on a 4 hours trip towing a trailer to haul a small tractor on it. after 3 hours of driving, I started hearing grinding and metal chewing sound coming from the front axle or close the wheel hubs. It was awful, terrible, ... you name it!!! I had to continue or I will lose the tractor I paid for already. The sound was coming for 1-2 seconds each 500 feet or so. It never stopped or changed. I pulled over to see what's going on and found the following:
1. Left shock is leaking badly
2. Right locking hub is gone (not sure if the truck had one before). I bought this truck last year, but I never had to use 4x4 and I know the 4x4 motor by the transfer case is missing and the nipple on the transfer case is set to the 2wd position so the front drive-shaft does not turn.
I took the front shock off and continued to drive without it, the noise did not go away.
I pulled over again and this time I noticed that the dust cover on each end of the front axle is missing too. I have never worked on these axles before, but I jacked one side, and sure enough, gear oil was leaking from the other side. I took the plug off the front differential and stuck my finger in it. I felt a creamy brown-greenish stuff in the differential. The consistency is like mayonnaise or thin peanut butter. I put the plug back on and went to pick up the tractor because I did not want to miss it fooling around with the truck on the highway.
The truck made it there and back (almost 5 hours total after the break down). The sound never stopped every 500 to 1000 ft.
After getting home safely, I took the other locking hub off, and took it for a test drive. I did not hear the noise, but now my right brakes are locking.
I took of the wheels and saw that the retaining snap ring (C clip) for the front axle on the right side came off by hand. I took the washers behind it off. Took the calipers and brackets off. I have never done front axle rebuild. I am not sure what has been damaged and what's still good.
Right of the bat, I know, at least, I need 2 shocks, one brake caliper and pads.
My questions are:
1. Is it possible to take the front axles off on both sides and make it 2wd for now until I have the money to rebuild the axle?
2. Could I use the same hubs? or they are most likely damaged and how to tell?
3. How to tell if the differential is damaged/needs rebuilding?
4. How to tell if the axles/spindles are damaged?
5. Is there a step by step tutorial to rebuild the axle with all seals, bearings, ...etc? How hard is the job for a hobbyist? I do most of my repairs myself, and I was lucky at 36 years old, I never had to rebuild a differential.
6. What else I might have damaged in the process of driving it that long with the noise? How do I tell if I did?
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What might be causing this symptom?
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Ive seen this also on some 4runners. Ive had several vehicles many years old with no rust underneath at all and I check today and sure enough, some rust on the rear axle and in front suspension arms. I checked the lexus warranty and it is unclear whether this is covered.
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I just got my left front axle replaced on my Toyota (1993) and my engine mounts as well. The car is in great shape and has been driving well.Drove it away, and it was running great. It is still running great (after driving all the way home) but, I noticed it is making a loud clunking, metal on metal kind of noise on the front left axle when in first gear, happens more when turning (I think right, but maybe both right and left). I just paid a lot of money and trust the mechanic, but this does not sound right at all.
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Driving at hwy speeds and head a pop noise in front end. Stopped and couldn't find anything, heard it a couple of more times, still nothing found, now I have a grinding noise left front wheel. What the issue may be. 2001 Ford EX 4X4.
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I am having a whistling noise coming from my front axle... It only happens when the hubs are locked and in 4WD when hubs are unlocked and in 4wd there is no whistling noise... I know they are vacuum operated for the auto hubs... We just got a good snow fall the past few days and have had to have the lockers locked to stay straight... Also can I keep the hubs locked and cruise and 55 to 60 mph ? or is it not good for the locking hubs...
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I commute 180 miles a day, 6 days a week. I noticed metal on metal grinding noise(more noticeable) at high speed above 75mph especially on asphalt road. I'm sure noise is there at low speed but not enough to notice. My car has 50,000 miles. Tires? Electric motor?
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