Ok… where was I?
Oh yes… I had just left the beach.
Ok. This part is a bit… delicate and so, I will attempt to tread lightly.
There was a problem with Freyja. Not a serious one… not yet… but a problem nonetheless.
The problem was that when I turned my steering wheel hard over in either direction this annoying, indeed disturbing, thump came from under the front suspension. Hard enough that I could feel the vibration through the truck.
Uh oh…
I had been down this road before with Rouge and knew, generally, what it was. It was a bad lower control arm bushing. You see metal on metal is, when it comes to moving parts… often a bit of a problem. Especially in a system like an independent front suspension when the control arms may need to move in ways that a simple uni-directional bolt together hinge can anticipate. In order to deal with this they surround the bolt with a metal sleeve which is itself surrounded by a bushing. Like a super dense rubber pad, for lack of a better way of saying it, that gives the bolt just a bit of movement. The problem is when the bushings start to deteriorate they move more than they should and, eventually, the bolt snaps back into place and creates the annoying thump. The thump is the sound of the bolt hitting the inside of the mount.
(I’m not a mechanic so these are, obviously, layman’s terms. If you are a mechanic… well… good for you.)
In and of itself this is not a particularly big problem. But it is however, the pebble that will start an avalanche. An avalanche that will, eventually, cause you to have to replace your entire front end… awesome.
So… I took Freyja to the friendly neighborhood Toyota dealership and asked specifically for the mechanic who had figured out the problem when Rogue had it.
I got a kid that was like… Harold… you know… from the Harold and Kumar movies…
He acted high. He acted lazy. He acted like he was an idiot. I was not impressed. If you are my mechanic and I know more about how my truck works than you… bah-roh…
Anyway…
I spent hours trying to explain what was wrong to him and he just kept telling me that he couldn’t replicate what was happening.
No kidding.
So, I grabbed the service manager and he got me the mechanic I originally asked for and… amazingly… he found the problem. I was right; it was a bad lower control arm bushing.
Now… here’s where it gets interesting.
Lower control arm bushings are, according to those in the know, a cast iron bitch to push out and replace. It is FAR easier to simply replace the entire lower control arm.
Remember that when you are wondering why you are paying $45,000 for a $15,000 car.
They didn’t have a new lower control arm, they had to order it.
Several days later I brought Freyja back to the dealership. It took a couple hours but they got it replaced…. Then… they needed to do a new alignment and… when that was complete… I was informed that the new tires hadn’t been balanced correctly and the previous alignment had been done improperly.
Awesome.
Another hour and Freyja was done and back on the road.
The service manager covered it as a warranty repair so it cost yours truly nothing, which is my favorite price, and suggested that next time I need an alignment… I just come to them.
And I think that I will.
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