Ball joint? CV joint?
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Ball joint? CV joint?
Howdy,
I've been having some weird issues with my 2000 Stratus for the last couple of weeks. We had some heavy snow, and driving to work I hit a few big chunks of ice on the road (curse my city and their slacker snow clearing crew!).
A day later I started to get a creaking sound when turning sharp at slow speeds (forwards or reverse). I was concerned about it and was prepared to jack the thing up and take a look, but two days later the sound went away. The sound had only been coming from behind the drivers-side front wheel, and it sounded like a scraping/creaking sound - kind of like two bricks of styrofoam being rubbed together. It wasn't particularly loud, but still alarming.
When it went away I chalked it up to road grit being stuck in somewhere that finally freed itself.
A couple of days later I noticed the steering felt a little looser than normal. Since I'm paranoid about my car I figured it was my imagination. But this morning, about two weeks since the sound went away, the steering is definitely noticeably looser. The wheel moves back and forth quite a lot when going over bumps, and I'm just not feeling enough resistance on the wheel when turning.
I've had my tie-rods go bad before and that made the steering loose, but this doesn't feel the same. When the tie-rods were bad I was losing control going around corners, but I'm not having control issues that way this time.
I have pretty new tie-rods, but I'm going to check them out anyway. My other ideas are a ball joint or a CV joint.
Could the ice have damaged one of those, or perhaps exacerbated something that was already going bad, and caused these problems?
I haven't jacked the car up yet and tested the wheel for play (I'm going to do that tonight), but I wanted to get some opinions. Ideally I'd like to find out what's going on tonight, and park the car until this weekend when I have time to fix it.
Thanks
I've been having some weird issues with my 2000 Stratus for the last couple of weeks. We had some heavy snow, and driving to work I hit a few big chunks of ice on the road (curse my city and their slacker snow clearing crew!).
A day later I started to get a creaking sound when turning sharp at slow speeds (forwards or reverse). I was concerned about it and was prepared to jack the thing up and take a look, but two days later the sound went away. The sound had only been coming from behind the drivers-side front wheel, and it sounded like a scraping/creaking sound - kind of like two bricks of styrofoam being rubbed together. It wasn't particularly loud, but still alarming.
When it went away I chalked it up to road grit being stuck in somewhere that finally freed itself.
A couple of days later I noticed the steering felt a little looser than normal. Since I'm paranoid about my car I figured it was my imagination. But this morning, about two weeks since the sound went away, the steering is definitely noticeably looser. The wheel moves back and forth quite a lot when going over bumps, and I'm just not feeling enough resistance on the wheel when turning.
I've had my tie-rods go bad before and that made the steering loose, but this doesn't feel the same. When the tie-rods were bad I was losing control going around corners, but I'm not having control issues that way this time.
I have pretty new tie-rods, but I'm going to check them out anyway. My other ideas are a ball joint or a CV joint.
Could the ice have damaged one of those, or perhaps exacerbated something that was already going bad, and caused these problems?
I haven't jacked the car up yet and tested the wheel for play (I'm going to do that tonight), but I wanted to get some opinions. Ideally I'd like to find out what's going on tonight, and park the car until this weekend when I have time to fix it.
Thanks