Tag Archives: steering parts

A steering wheel that rocks in your hands, up and down or side to side, is a column wear problem, not a rack or tire problem. On 10-year-old and up cars like the Camry, Accord, Civic and Altima, the wheel is mounted on a shaft that rides in plastic and metal bearings inside the column housing, and those bushings dry out, crack and loosen with years of tilt use. You feel it as a wobble or a free movement of the wheel itself, separate from any steering play at the tires. It rarely causes a loss of control, but it drives the driver crazy and can wear the clockspring contacts over time. The fix is inside the column: bearings, bushings and the tilt mechanism. This guide separates column rocking from front-end play so you do not order a rack for a bushing problem, and it fits most EPS sedans and crossovers.

A shimmy after a bump is that quick side-to-side buzz the wheel kicks when you hit a pothole, expansion joint or rough patch, and which takes a second or two to settle. It happens on independent front-end trucks like the F-150 and Silverado of any age, and it is the front end telling you it has lost its damping. A small bump normally disturbs the wheel briefly, and the steering damper and the joints then absorb it. When the damper is weak or the tie rod ends and ball joints are loose, that disturbance rings out as a shimmy instead of dying. It is not the violent death wobble of a solid-axle truck, but the worn parts are the same family. This guide finds the loose link that lets the shimmy survive, and the checks apply across the Tundra and most makes and models of pickup.

A front-end clunk over bumps on a Silverado almost always narrows down to two suspects: the lower control arm bushings and the sway bar links. The weight of the truck and the leverage of the sway bar make these the first parts to wear, whether the truck is a newer model with low miles or a 200k-mile work truck. The same clunk on a Sierra or a RAM 1500 usually follows the same two suspects, so the check routine transfers between makes. The control arm bushing clunk comes from rubber that has separated or sagged, letting the arm move where it should not. The sway link clunk comes from a worn ball or stud at the end of the link, which knocks as the bar twists. Because both live in the same corner and sound alike from the driver seat, the diagnosis is a ten-minute job with a pry bar — and it decides whether the fix is a twenty-dollar link or a control arm.

A steering wheel that shakes at highway speed is almost always something rotating out of balance or out of round in the front end. Tires are the first suspect — balance weights lost, a belt separated, or a wheel bent — but the shake can also come from hub and wheel bearing play, worn tie rod ends or ball joints, or a steering damper too tired to settle the movement. The trick is to locate the shake: whether it is in the wheel or the seat, whether it appears at one speed or all speeds, and whether it changes under braking. Each of those clues cuts the suspect list in half and points to the right fix. Work through the rotating parts before the joints, because a balance job is far cheaper than a set of joints and fixes most highway shakes.

Steering wheel play is the distance the wheel moves before the front tires respond, and it grows as every joint in the steering chain wears. Some free movement is designed in, but when the wheel swings noticeably before the tires move, something in that chain is loose: the column or U-joint, the rack internals, the inner and outer tie rod ends, or the ball joints — and on parallelogram trucks, the pitman and idler arms and the drag link. Because each link multiplies the play you feel at the wheel, small wear in several joints adds up fast. The way to find it is simple: rock the wheel and watch each joint, working from the column out to the tires. A loose joint is not just annoying — it wanders at speed, and a joint that is finally pulled apart is a steering failure waiting to happen.

The drag link is the heavy steel rod that carries steering motion from the pitman arm out to the steering [more]

The idler arm supports the center link on the side opposite the pitman arm. It bolts to the frame rail [more]

The steering column is the shaft that runs from the steering wheel down through the dash to the rack or [more]

The inner tie rod end sits at each end of the steering rack, hidden inside the rubber bellows. It bolts [more]