Supplemental damping can be used as a cost-effective method to reduce structural vibrations. In particular, passive systems are now widely accepted and have numerous applications in the field. However, they are typically tuned to specific excitations and their performances are bandwidth-limited. A solution is to use semi-active devices, which have shown to be capable of substantially enhanced mitigation performance. The authors have recently proposed a new type of semi-active device, which consists of a variable friction mechanism based on a vehicle duo-servo drum brake, a mechanically robust and reliable technology. The theoretical performance of the proposed device has been previously demonstrated via numerical simulations. In this paper, we further the understanding of the device, termed Modified Friction Device (MFD) by fabricating a small scale prototype and characterizing its dynamic behavior. While the dynamics of friction is well understood for automotive braking technology, we investigate for the first time the dynamic behavior of this friction mechanism at low displacements and velocities, in both forward and backward directions, under various hydraulic pressures. A modified 3-stage dynamic model is introduced. A LuGre friction model is used to characterize the friction zone (Stage 1), and two pure stiffness regions to characterize the dynamics of the MFD once the rotation is reversed and the braking shoes are sticking to the drum (Stage 2) and the rapid build up of forces once the shoes are held by the anchor pin (Stage 3). The proposed model is identified experimentally by subjecting the prototype to harmonic excitations. It is found that the proposed model can be used to characterize the dynamics of the MFD, and that the largest fitting error arises at low velocity under low pressure input. The model is then verified by subjecting the MFD to two different earthquake excitations under different pressure inputs. The model is capable of tracking the device׳s response, despite a lower fitting performance under low pressure and small force output, as it was found in the harmonic tests due to the possible nonlinearity in Stage 2 of the model.