well i had my rear axle seal replaced about 3 months ago. and i take the truck to get new brakes and it has another blown rear axle seal. i was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. and im driving a 99 4runner with 285's if that helps?

 

Pretty common issue. Id check to make sure the rear diff plug is open. Its able to be taken off with a socket.

 

I second the differential breather. Take it off, clean it out, if its gunked, the hot/cold expansion the oil undergos everytime you drive, can push oil out the weakest point which is the axle seals.

Common on any axle for that matter. If your under there might as well hook up breather hoses, number of ways to do that. I took the cap, spring and rubber plug off mine and hoseclamped acrylic hose and ran it high up under both my bed and for the front into my enginge compartment. Your probably not going to see much offroad if you got a 99 runner and 285's so that would be a cheap way to go. Infact I've had mine hooked up like that for a couple years now and no swamp, log, tree, root has torn them off. =)

 

where is that at on it?

 

top of the axle housing

 

ditto on the axle breather.

 

take a wrench and unscrew the breather from the top of the housing and make sure it is all cleaned up before reinstalling

 

This is a guide to extend it, but it shows you where it is

http://www.4runners.org/writeups/typerdiff/index.html

 

Make sure the new part number from Toyota is the one used-it ends with a 6.

Are you not covered by the original repair for a year?

Come over to T4R.org and search as this is a recent and yet reoccuring issue.

I am entertaining thoughts of pushing Toyota customer service to make this a recall-any thoughts on how to approach that?

This just happened to me on drivers side and I am hoping to get to the passenger side one before it blows and mucks up the rear drums again.

 

yea i took it off this moring and it was clean...?

 

Who did your axle seals and what kind of seals did they use? Did you do both of them?

I had mine done on my '97 and they used some aftermarket brand of seals and they failed in about 12k miles and the next time I used Toyota OEM and also when I did them on my '99 at 100k and they've been fine for 40k miles now.

 

lucky for you guys. Ive gone through 4 in the past year. All on the Driver side rear axle. The last shop actually researched it a little bit and found out this is a known problem and toyota actually has redesigned it. So it has new rear axle shaft (I think) bearings and seals... This should fix it he said. I am going to write toyota and see what they say.

 

i just did my drivers side, and learned why mine was leaking. its very difficult to get it in there properly without a seal driver. i did mine shade tree style (in my driveway with beer) rather than at my shop. (where theres a seal driver, but no beer) mine came out very easy with a claw hammer, and was definetly put in with something other than the proper tool. its real easy to bend the seal inwards if you dont have something real close to the outside diameter of the seal. it took me 2 seals and alot of scrounging around for something to use as a seal driver.