Two Guys Rally

The Volvo Chronicles: Worn Suspension Parts
[ July 14th, 2008 ] By: Mark Ozimek Posted in » Ramblings

Since there are more things going on with my S70 T5 than just some missing power, I decided it would be wise to just label everything that relates to my car the same way. After all, it’s a ten year old car with 150,000 miles on it. Things are gonna break, and I’m gonna have to replace stuff and write about it.

So what happened this time? Well, I had to get my car inspected, in order to remain road-legal. So I drop my car off at a local mechanic in the morning. After a few hours, I get a call from the mechanic, informing me that my inner tie-rods had too much play in them, and he couldn’t pass the car as it was. In case you are unsure, the tie-rods are the beams that connect the steering rack to the wheels so that you can turn the car. They have to allow movement in a few axes to account for turning and suspension travel. The parts the rub together are usually the parts that break after a while. If you break the rod itself, I’ll be very impressed.

Suspicious, because I never noticed excessive slop in the front end, I went down to check it out, and sure enough, there was a lot of play. I don’t know exactly how much is passable, but the wheels were pivoting about the vertical axis enough to move the front and rear parts of the tire tread around 3/8″ to 1/2″ on the driver’s side, a little less on passenger.

I give him the go ahead to replace the inner tie rods, and asked him to change out the outer tie-rods too, since it’s only 5 minutes of extra work once you’re in there. If the inners are worn out, the outers are likely to be pretty bad too. Unfortunately, since the car was already in the shop, and I was on a tight time schedule, I didn’t do the work myself. It’s not a very hard job, just somewhat time consuming, and you should get an alignment afterwards.

Curious to see how much of an effect the worn parts had, I took the car out for a spirited drive afterwards. The difference was almost surprising, especially over rough surfaces. I had never thought about it before, but when turning on a road that has bumps, or is generally rough, my S70 made some clunking noises, and tended to skip sideways every now and then.

Now with the new tie-rods, the car was much more settled and predictable, and a few of the clunking noises I had grown accustomed to and thought nothing of had disappeared. Of course, it wasn’t all better, since all the other bushings and ball joints are probably pretty old too. Someday I’ll have to take the time to rip apart my suspension and replace all the other worn parts.

Moral of the story? Check the amount of play in the suspension part joints, even something that was relatively unnoticeable could actually be a pretty serious issue!