2001 Honda civic EX. manual transmission 166k miles. Rear drums, fairly new front brake pads.
I went to get new tires on my car yesterday. When they got the car off the ground they called me out to show me what they noticed. All but my drivers rear wheel were hard to turn. My first thought was brakes were sticking for a few reasons. My other thought was bad/seized/frozen wheel bearings. I did have to change my front passenger wheel bearing because my stud was sheered off and the shop wouldn't change my tires until that was fixed. To change the stud I had to press out the spindle hub assembly. There was some slop in the bearing so I decided to replace that as well since I had it apart.
As for my thoughts as to why it is the brakes. I just bought the car a few days ago and first impressions of the car was that the cars brakes were tight (I thought that was a good thing), as in there wasn't much travel in the pedal before the car started slowing down. The second thing I noticed is that the e-brake doesn't have much travel either before the rear tires lock up. Finally when I come up to a stop and put the car in neutral and coast the car will slow down much faster than any of my other Hondas I've owned over the years. Also worth mentioning is that the car doesn't roll hardly any when in neutral with no brakes applied. When I changed the stud I had to take off the brakes and the bottom slide pin doesn't move (which made putting the caliper back on difficult. I plan on taking that all apart and cleaning it up and greasing it since it is probably rusted up (or buying new depending).
I'm not totally convinced that the brakes are the culprit as they don't make a dragging noise nor is there the distinct smell of burning brakes but my rims do appear to be hot after driving 20+ miles. (not that I know how hot rims should be after driving I just happened to noticed because I was wearing shorts and my leg touched the rim and it was warm...also not sure what normal temps are for that sorta thing) As for my other thoughts I'm thinking that maybe a seized bearing is the problem. I do have some road noise that is more pronounced when I do a slight slalom on the highway (the normal test for wheel bearings) but the noise is still around after changing the wheel bearing which I thought it was.
Any thoughts?