dhagood
Silver Member
my personal vehicle these days is a 1995 nissan pathfinder that was originally bought with 135000 miles or so for my then high-school aged children (the kids, now 26 and 24, drive far better cars than i do). my wife and i have been traipsing around the area southeast of denver for retirement property. after driving off of and then back onto the gravel road that fronts the property we will purchase in two weeks, the right front wheel started making a nasty clunking sound. i drove home, put the car up on jackstands, and started poking around. i almost immediately found a washer from where the front upper a-arm bolts to the frame. shims are added and subtracted to this area to align the front end.
it looked to me on a very cursory examination that the rubber bushings that keep rearwords tension on the lower a-arm had shrunken and then torn, removing the proper tension and and allowing the frame-mounted upper a-arm to flex and spit the shims out. i ordered the appropriate parts, and twiddled my thumbs waiting for the parts to show up. 10 days or so later, i further disassembled the front suspension and discovered that the tension rods themselves were badly worn and rusted where the rods when through the rubber bushings. oh snap i said, ordered additional parts, and waited another 10 days or so. i crammed the new tension rods, rubber bushings, and spacers in where they needed to be, and smiled in anticipation of getting the pathfinder back on the road. on the drivers side, i decided that since i would have to have the car aligned anyway, i would remove all the alignment shims from both sides and have the alignment guy start from scratch. i backed off the two bolts, removed the shims, and tightened the bolts back up.
on the passenger side, which is the side making the ugly noise, the rear bolt tightened up but required a lot of effort. the front bolt also required a lot of effort, and tightened and tightened and... the bolt wasn't moving. i backed it out quite a bit, and the threads were badly rolled. oh my, sez i. darn, blast, and things of that general nature. it was kinda of late, so i quit working on the car and spent the evening sniveling to myself. as everybody knows, all things being equal, if you screw up the threads on a bolt, you are also screwing up the threads on the nut. only this nut was welded inside a boxed frame.
the next day i backed the rear bolt out and looked at the threads. kinda rolled, but most likely saveable by re-tapping the threads. the front bolt was worse, and the threads might be to far gone to re-tap. i'll try, but we'll just have to see. i had decided the previous evening that i would put a time-sert into the welded nut, if possible, if the threads could not be saved. one thing i needed to know is whether or not there was enough depth to the nut to allow the insert to properly seat. so i looked into the hole in the frame rail to see how deep the nut was. i noticed a bright metal score in the inside frame rail, as if the bolt had bottomed out. ummm... so i looked in the rear hole and there was a similar mark there. i looked at the bolts in my hand, and the marking on the heads matched nicely. i went back to the driver's side, but those bolts had no markings on the head. i removed one of the driver's side bolts, and this is what i saw:
so running in the bolts to properly snug them down would cause them to bottom against the other side of the boxed frame. the bolts were obviously replacements, and somebody had goofed. wonderful. so off i went to the hardware store to try and get some shorter replacements. and what did i find when i tried to figure out what size the replacement bolts were? why, i found that some absolute moron had run two over-length sae bolts into my metric vehicle. one of these bolts was stripped out. if the other bolt had failed, i could have had the right front wheel wobble about with the upper a-arm no longer secured to the vehicle.
this happened the last time the vehicle had been aligned, and that was years ago. 3 years? 4? i don't even remember who i had do the alignment. i paid somebody my hard-earned money to do a sloppy, careless, dangerous job of repairing my vehicle. my wife has driven this vehicle. my daughter had driven this vehicle, as had my son. how can someone possibly believe that this was appropriate? i just don't get it.
it looked to me on a very cursory examination that the rubber bushings that keep rearwords tension on the lower a-arm had shrunken and then torn, removing the proper tension and and allowing the frame-mounted upper a-arm to flex and spit the shims out. i ordered the appropriate parts, and twiddled my thumbs waiting for the parts to show up. 10 days or so later, i further disassembled the front suspension and discovered that the tension rods themselves were badly worn and rusted where the rods when through the rubber bushings. oh snap i said, ordered additional parts, and waited another 10 days or so. i crammed the new tension rods, rubber bushings, and spacers in where they needed to be, and smiled in anticipation of getting the pathfinder back on the road. on the drivers side, i decided that since i would have to have the car aligned anyway, i would remove all the alignment shims from both sides and have the alignment guy start from scratch. i backed off the two bolts, removed the shims, and tightened the bolts back up.
on the passenger side, which is the side making the ugly noise, the rear bolt tightened up but required a lot of effort. the front bolt also required a lot of effort, and tightened and tightened and... the bolt wasn't moving. i backed it out quite a bit, and the threads were badly rolled. oh my, sez i. darn, blast, and things of that general nature. it was kinda of late, so i quit working on the car and spent the evening sniveling to myself. as everybody knows, all things being equal, if you screw up the threads on a bolt, you are also screwing up the threads on the nut. only this nut was welded inside a boxed frame.
the next day i backed the rear bolt out and looked at the threads. kinda rolled, but most likely saveable by re-tapping the threads. the front bolt was worse, and the threads might be to far gone to re-tap. i'll try, but we'll just have to see. i had decided the previous evening that i would put a time-sert into the welded nut, if possible, if the threads could not be saved. one thing i needed to know is whether or not there was enough depth to the nut to allow the insert to properly seat. so i looked into the hole in the frame rail to see how deep the nut was. i noticed a bright metal score in the inside frame rail, as if the bolt had bottomed out. ummm... so i looked in the rear hole and there was a similar mark there. i looked at the bolts in my hand, and the marking on the heads matched nicely. i went back to the driver's side, but those bolts had no markings on the head. i removed one of the driver's side bolts, and this is what i saw:
so running in the bolts to properly snug them down would cause them to bottom against the other side of the boxed frame. the bolts were obviously replacements, and somebody had goofed. wonderful. so off i went to the hardware store to try and get some shorter replacements. and what did i find when i tried to figure out what size the replacement bolts were? why, i found that some absolute moron had run two over-length sae bolts into my metric vehicle. one of these bolts was stripped out. if the other bolt had failed, i could have had the right front wheel wobble about with the upper a-arm no longer secured to the vehicle.
this happened the last time the vehicle had been aligned, and that was years ago. 3 years? 4? i don't even remember who i had do the alignment. i paid somebody my hard-earned money to do a sloppy, careless, dangerous job of repairing my vehicle. my wife has driven this vehicle. my daughter had driven this vehicle, as had my son. how can someone possibly believe that this was appropriate? i just don't get it.