I was hoping that you all could help me figure out what is wrong with my '08 TL.

About a week ago, on a several hour drive, I noticed a noise from the passenger side rear wheel that sounded a bit like a hamster wheel while going about 30-40mph. That had quickly passed, but I was wanting to find out if there was something wrong with the car.

So I jacked up the car today with the e-brake off and the car in Neutral (auto trans) and spun the wheels. The rear wheels make a scraping sound that varies based on the position of the wheel (same spots sound worse than others) on both back tires. The front tires were harder to spin, but they too seemed to have some resistance.

Has anyone ran into these issues before?

I was thinking that it could be the wear indicators on the brake pads, but would they only make noise on a free spinning wheel and not when I actually apply the brakes (hear no noise then)? I was also thinking that maybe the e-brake was somehow slightly on (is this even possible?). Also, could the pads just need to be adjusted (if so, how?). Can it be the bearings? I tried wiggling each tire in the air and they seem firmly in place...

Thank you for the help!

 

yes the wear indicators are designed for that very reason.


if the pads are extremely worn down they will produce that noise even if not applying the brakes..


If the problem where the wheel bearing it would produce a humming noise.

 

Thanks I will check that out, it is weird to me that they never made any noise prior to this point...

 

I finally got the time to figure out this whole issue & write about it. I hope that one day it may help someone else searching through these threads with a similar issue.

First of all, it is normal for a light, sandpaper-like, sound to come from rotating a wheel in the air freely. This is due to the fact that the pads are always in light contact with the rotors.

Now for my particular issue:

The pads had a lot of life left on them, but still seemed to not rotate as freely as they should (maybe 1-2 full revolutions after I spun them while it was on jack stands) and seemed to be a bit loud. So after discussing this with a few friends, I bought some brake cleaner and applied it liberally after I removed the rims and manually rotated the rotors and applied liberally again. After I put my rims back on, the rear wheels were now able to rotate about 4 full revolutions after I spun them and the sound was much lighter.

So, if there is plenty of pad life left, you might be able to make things work better with some brake cleaner!