My '98 4Runner Limited is in the shop right now due to brake problems. The brakes were sticking and causing the vehicle to stop even tho the brakes were not applied. I've been told that rear differential oil is leaking onto the rear brake drums due to the failure of 2 seals (one on each side). This happened about 10K miles after the rear suspension recall maintenance was performed. During that maint. the rear differential oil was also changed. It seems like quite a coincidence. Anyone ever heard of anything like this? What's the chances that seals on both sides would fail at the same time? <img border="0" title="" alt="[Confused]" src="images/icons/confused.gif" />

That's fairly common among 3rd gens. As a matter of fact, it just happened to my 2000 about a week ago. They fixed mine for free under warranty I think.

The same thing happened to me. I dont know your driving habits or if you go off road much or through mud or anything like that but what happened to mine, according to the dealer, was there was very fine dirt that made its way past the seal and caused it to fail.

I told him I took it off road often and went through creek crossings and through mud and stuff like that. He said that's not a big deal as long as you wash the mud and crap off of the drums and inside too.

I look at it like this, what a huge pain in the ass to have to remove the drums every time I go into mud but it is more of a pain in the ass to take it to the dealer and have them change the crap out.

My two cents...

-John

Either there should be a recall by Toyota on these axles/seals or whoever puts them on is doing something wrong. My guess is the first.

my rear driver side just went out and my truck has 135k on it so I guess I got good mileage out of it. No biggie, I will replace it when I get regeared/locked. In the meantime I checked the fluid level and used some degreaser to clean the brake and surrounding area.

Thanks for the info. I've been researching this for several hours and have discovered that leaking rear differentials are apparently common. It looks like a design flaw or bad manufacturing across thousands of units. My '98 has 107,000 miles and is now out of warranty. Considering that I have had every scheduled maint. performed by the same dealership that I purchased the vehicle from, I'm thinking about asking for some relief from the crazy prices that they want me to pay for this fix. They said that I should take this opportunity to also replace the bearings so altogether, with both sides, they want $960. Anyone have a similar experience with expensive issues that showed up within 10K miles of warranty expiration?

For $960 you could probably get the tooling to do the all the work yourself. That's what I'm planning on doing since my seals are gone too. I'm going to throw a rear disc brake conversion in there too while I'm at it. If you've got enough space in the garage for the tools, you'd be money ahead by doing it all yourself!

My fathers 97 went through 3 seals in 70k miles, all on the right side. A new axle shaft was installed along with the 3rd seal, and it still started to weep out into the brake drum.

Hey valkyrie,

Lookie here at YotaTech http://www.yotatech.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4889 you might find it helpful.

My 1st gen runner is 16 yrs old already, and still on the original rear axle seals/bearings! I know one guy w/ 340K on his rear bearings (also 1st gen).