by Shdwdrgn » Wed Mar 16, 2016 8:12 pm
All right, I decided not to wait and took a look at things when I got home from work. If the hub were bent, I would expect it to be a few degrees off from 90, and should be easy to spot against a square. I lined up the axle against several machined spots, and even the flat area where the rock-shield sits, but there's no obvious faults there.
So I looked around some more, and found something else... the bottom control arm. First, the hole where the pin goes through for the shock tower -- that is obviously out of round on the back side, I'd guestimate by 1/8 to 1/4". The other, more worrisome item is harder to describe... The control arm is shaped like a Y, and let's say the bottom leg of the Y is where the ball joint is mounted. That is a solid cast piece that is welded inside of the shell that makes up the top part of the Y. Follow me so far? Well, at the point where the two pieces meet, the shell is supposed to be a tight fit around the cast piece (as observed on the other new one and the two old ones), but it's not. There is about 3/16" clearance along the bottom side, which indicates something flexed in there.
Now my concern is that there isn't a whole lot of obvious welding holding these two pieces together, and the cast piece seems to only slide into the shell by a couple inches. So is there a chance the weld between these two pieces is compromised? My initial feeling is to replace the whole control arm again just to be safe, but is there any easy way to check if it's actually safe to be driving it until then? And if this piece HAS been bent, is that something which could cause the steering to hit the limiter early, and/or cause a new alignment to still want to drift left?
GT5/G80, 265/70-16, PCMforLess + personal tuning, quad headlights
Self-made steel front bumper / pushbar / skid / CAI / lightbar