When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Recently have replaced all 4 lower coffin arms and diagonal forked links, aligned car, and checked everything is tight. I now have a new popping/clunking sound that was not there before. The only way I can reliably reproduce it is making a tight right turn at walking speed. As I turn a corner, when the wheel gets to about 180 degrees to the right, I get a slight popping/clunking sensation. When I unwind the wheel I might feel it again, like something is popping back into place, but not every time. I cannot get it to make the sound when turning left; only right. I also can't feel anything when the car is up in the air, even if I put a jack under the suspension to load it while turning the wheels.
It's pretty hard to tell exactly where it's coming from. I'd say it's felt mostly through the floor of the car; MAYBE a little through the steering wheel, but really it seems more like it's in the body. I did not notice it immediately after replacing components; it showed up more like 2-3 weeks later.
Things I can think it would be:
A DOA ball joint on one of the new coffin arms - anybody ever heard of this?
An upper strut mount (these are about 2 years and 10k miles old)
Swaybar links (these are looking pretty tired but I can't feel any play in them when prying on they by hand)
Steering rack
Wheels/tires catching on some kind of underbody stuff? (can't find any evidence of this)
I'm wondering if replacing the tired control arms has now put more load into the swaybar links, or something else, and exposed a weakness. It seems like it has to be suspension/steering related, but for the life of me I can't find anything loose.
My first course of action will be to replace all the swaybar links since those are cheap, but beyond that I'm stumped and hesitant to just throw parts at it. Anybody have ideas or experience?
UPDATE: Solution was re-torquing inner control arm bolts.Link
Make sure the top-mount bearings (that sit between the top of the spring and the topmounts) are functional. It sounds like they might be binding/releasing... #11 in this diagram http://www.autoatlanta.com/porsche-p...section=402-00
Certainly a possibility; would be disappointing since they are only ~10k miles old. I'm going to try disconnecting both swaybars to see if the sound goes away.
Several years ago there was a post of a strange front end noise -the solution was to retorque the steering rack .Could be a wild goose chase but...………...
After triple checking everything I believe it was the inner bolt holding the LF control arm to the subframe. Items 4-5 below. It was not "loose", per se, but was not at the full torque value, so must have been just loose enough for the control arm and bolt to slop around on the that hole under load, moving a fraction of a millimeter and sending a clunk through the floor. After retorquing it I can't reproduce the noise. Marked it with a paint pen to monitor whether it loosens up over time. Hopefully fixed!
Check your wheel hubs, when I went 2wd we had to replace the hubs as they were in really poor shape and made similar noises. Car had around 85,000 miles at the time.
I had a creak noise when apply brakes. It turned out that I had to tighten the diagonal control arm supports. It's part number 3 in the post above. The torque value is something close to 118, so it needs to be tight to prevent that creaking noise.
Just to be sure you saw the arrow on the arm and corresponding arrow on the frame. They should be lined up pointing at each other before you tighten the arm, so that you don’t have too much preload on the rubber bushing when you let the car down.
10-16-2018, 10:20 AM
Popping sound on slow right turns
