Swede

As i was heading home from work the other morning, (graveyard shift, UGH! ), I started to get a weird, gradually increasing, rapid vibration. At first I thought my drive shaft was comming loose, as I've had this happen to me years ago on my '83 Toy pick-up. Then I figured it was possibly some frozen slush stuck to a rim from when I went to work the night before. Anyways, I slowed down and pulled to the side of the highway and the vibration went away. So I took off again, at 90kph's, down the highway. About a couple of minutes later it happened again, so I did the same thing, I slowed down and it went away. Since i only had a couple more miles to get home, I carried on and made it home with no more occurances.

When I got home i check the rig out and found the right rear wheel warm and the brake drum VERY warm. I jacked up the rig and tried to wiggle the wheel around, to check the bearing, and it felt good, took off the wheel and noticed that the brake seemed to be dragging on that side. Right away I thought of the E-brake levers that were allways seizing on my old pick-ups and had a look, sure enough it was very stiff. I tapped it a bit with a hammer and freed it up.

Which leads me to the question, would a dragging e-brake cause a gradual onseting vibration as I described? Or do you think it was just something on the rim? This happened a few days ago and hasn't happened since.

P.S. I can't believe after all these years Toyota can't come up with a solution to this problem of seizing e-brakes.

MTL_4runner

If the ebrake sticks and the drum gets very hot then sure it will cause a vibration as it begins to warp.
Does the pedal vibrate when you step on the brakes?
Get it fixed soon or you may need brakes too.

Swede

There was no vibration in the pedal that I noticed. I may have noticed a slight bit in the steering wheel which leads me to believe that it my have been in the front end somewhere. As it has not happened since I'm kinda guessing it was a clump of frozen slush on the rim somewhere, because when I went to work that night we had about 3" on the highway that night, and maybe it fell off, or melted, after I pulled over the second time. I don't know.

I've freed up the lever going into the backing plate so the E-brake works freely now but I'll check it again for heat when I go to work tonight.