With the car down flat in your garage, no jacks.... can you rock the car in situ and make a noise (no not you, the car) ? The car is so tightly sprung it is hard to rock... so open your door and press up on the roofline. Start a' rockin'. Any noise? If so, using chassis ears should find this issue pretty quickly.

Peace
Bruce in Philly (now Atlanta)

 

Just a thought on the noise when lifting the car ...

One of my friend's cars makes a lot of groaning noise when I raise it until the tires clear the floor. Nothing wrong with it. Just a very tight suspension. As it is raised the tires drop relative to the chassis. Without the rolling that occurs when the car is moving the tires drag across the floor a bit creating stresses where they would normally not occur. Picture turning the steering wheel when the car is not moving (not a recommended action). But when moving those stresses are absent.

 

The inner control arm bushing should be placed under load when tightened. Was that done?

See:

 

Thanks for all the replies. Yes. The control arm bushing was tightened when the suspension is at ride height. That about 15.875 inches from fender to middle of axle.

As far as the rest - Well...job is at a stand still with car on the air and partially disassembled.

I bought this

The FCP video said use the lisle 45750. But it only came with 6 adapters. And I figured why get 6 when you could get 12? And bought the OEM heavy duty one

Attachment 1332480

So last week I didn't even know what an inner tie rod was. Much less a tool. Now I am the expert.

Turns out the heavy duty ones have a 2.5 inch diameter compared to 1.75 of the smaller ones

And on a 997 that extra 3/4 of an inch is enough to make it so you can't get the tool on straight.

The good news is that I rounded off the hex on the inner tie rod. The bad news is I rounded off the hex on the inner tie rod.

So I ordered the correct tool and going to spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to break loose the inner tie rod.

 

Just venting.

So I sent back the OEM tool, got the correct lisle tool (which is way better quality)

Kept everything on the counter in the family room

Finally got around to working on it tonight. With the correct tool it came off in less than 1 minutes. This is literally a 30 minute job if you have the correct tools.

So go to use my new boot clamps and they are gone. We had a party and my wife cleaned the counter. When she cleans she just stuffs everything out of site. One tie rod set was on a shelf in the closet. The other was on a trash pile in the garage. The pliers? No where to be found.

So after looking and looking and asking her (she doesn't remember seeing them) - I had to order a new set from Amazon

On a good note they lost the lisle tool in shipping for a day. Then one showed up the next day. And yesterday another one showed up. So I got two inner tie rod removed tools and 0 offset boot clamps.

 

With the correct tools changing inner tie rods is a 20 minute job.

That being said driving a car to the shop for an alignment with tires pointed two different directions is scary. I measured and remeasured. But was still a scary drive.

Told them to take it for a test drive after and check everything. Hopefully all better now. I could not tell on the test drive if the noise was gone.