Dinging Clanging Ringing Sounds While Driving Diagnose Suspension Noise on Your Car

Noises that cars make, that's what we're gonna talk about today, noises that your car makes and you can't figure it out.

So you just heard the noise that we hear when we're inside that passenger compartment. Now, let's do a little CSI homework. We're gonna look for other things and broken things. We know we don't have anything broken because it wasn't severe. It's just a banging noise, right? Well, you know, you're gonna check for banging, you're gonna check for broken, you're gonna check for movement. That's a key thing that a lot of people don't check for, something that has movement in it, not so severe that you can find it. But we're looking for bolts that possibly have moved like the chassis bolt here. If this has shifted at any point, you might find a ring from where that washer was sitting and it shifted a certain angle. And then you'd go to the other side and that same marking would be shifted the same way. So, one of the first things we're gonna do is look for bushings on top of the bolt movement which I just pointed out.

But let's look at the bushings of everything because ripped bushings will cause the suspension to move back and forth when it has the weight of the vehicle on it. Now the biggest culprit to me on these would be these front bushings. And we have some dry rot, but nothing's torn by the looks of it. And I'm also gonna be looking right here. This is a pressed-in bushing so it's got a steel ring around it where the rubber goes and it presses into this whole lower arm. This, I want to look for the distance between this and the one on the driver's side. So I'm gonna compare both of them. These are things that are very overlooked by a lot of technicians and mechanics, whether it's because they just never learned or they never thought about it. One of the other things that really drives me crazy is when I would have the guys working for me come up to me and go, "No, there's nothing wrong. I didn't hear anything." Let me tell you what I used to tell them, "I think this person has something better to do other than drop their car off so that you can say there's nothing wrong." Correct? Correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm sure you'd rather be at work with your family or having fun with your friends than dropping your car off at some garage and hoping that they find nothing wrong. It just doesn't happen. It's called intimate noise. You really got to do your best, put your heart into it and find it for that customer.

You're not finding something that they're not crying about, right? You're finding something that they are aware of. So do your best, you'll get a repeat customer and you'll have a happy person. And if you're doing it DIY, do it yourself, go to them and say, "This is what it is and I know it is," then you'll save yourself some diagnostic time. What I did find was the shock bell housing, the top of the shocks where it's supposed to keep the water out, both of them facing towards the driver's seat and passenger seat have marks on them. So that explains to me that the back half of it, no marks, the side has no marks, just the front. So that would mean this rear suspension to me has either shifted too far back so when that bell housing comes down, instead of it coming down on this tube in a straight line down, it's coming down and scraping non-stop. Well, I heard that noise too, it sounds like a bell. It's like ding, ding, ding. I might even get it from doing it from here. There it is. That housing is actually hitting the shock. That's not right.

So, talking to the driver, he did have this rear subframe cradle replaced by a salvage yard. Now, it went in, he said he got an alignment, but I'm gonna tell you a little thing about alignment, not all, but some people when they set up a four-wheel alignment, they only make adjustments in the front and it's not their fault. Maybe they were never taught how to do adjustments in the rear or they look real quick and they say, "Well, there's no adjustments back here." Well, there's always an adjustment. Trust me. You could loosen up these cradle bolts and you could shift this whole cradle. Even an eighth of an inch will make a huge difference when it comes to dog tailing or moving. So, I don't have an alignment machine so I can't do that for you. But what I am gonna do is I'm gonna take the shocks out. I'm gonna put new shocks in, but I'm gonna install them with the suspension jacked up. So, I'm gonna put a pole jack underneath my main suspension here, compress this spring, and then I'm gonna take the shock out and put it in and I'm gonna leave the other one in and I'm gonna check and see if I get a wear mark when I drive it because that's gonna be a key figure right there.

So, when I took the trunk liner out, look what I found. Yep. One time they had a flat and they just panicked, you know when they were done through everything in there. I don't think that's gonna make it quiet going down the road either. So, let's remove this and see if there's an actual holding bracket that I can put down or maybe eliminate some noises. All right. So, I've already undone the shock from the top so we'll just take the last bottom bolt out. Yeah, a little bit bigger of a gun. Nice. Ahh, look at all of that beautiful rust. So as you can see, I have a pole jack supporting this little control arm with the spring for the rear suspension. And I've brought it up about almost 2 inches higher than the other side, maybe 1 1/2 inches. And I'm ready to put the shock back up in. I'm putting a new shock up because I want to see if it makes any marks or lines. I wanna see if tightening this with a pole jack on it is gonna make the world of difference.

Now I'm gonna take the pole jack down. You can see the actual how much this drops the suspension because the top of the shock is still not attached. Quite a bit. So I did what I said I was gonna do. I took the shock out, I put a new shock in, but when I installed the new shock, I supported the lower control arm here because we have independent suspension, and I tightened it up, and we lowered it down, and the bell of the top of the shock is hitting again in the front. So we're gonna have the same problem here. So, the next thing I'm gonna do is there's three bolts on each side of these cradles. I have one, two, and then three up between that spring. I'm gonna loosen all six, three on both sides, and I'm gonna take my big pry bar, and I'm gonna pry this thing forward, tighten it up, then let's see what we get. And I forgot to mention the two bolts here on the forward part of the lateral arm on both sides.

So I loosened up this whole rear cradle and I put a pole jack again under that control arm on the driver side and you look at what happened. The shock centered right out. So, now I know what it would be like with the load on the tire like it's on the ground. And I'm gonna tighten up the cradle on this side, and then do it the same on that side, and let's see what it looks like and sounds like when we put it down. So I want to show you real quick what I meant by when I said earlier, look for movement on bolts that hold suspension up. So now that I've loosened this rear cradle up and I've shifted it, you can see clearly where the washer used to sit and where it sits now. This is all tightened up and ready to go. So, if you get in a car accident and you don't know...you feel like your car is not right, and it's been checked off, you have one year to open that claim again. So, crawl underneath your car and see if you see any washing movement like that. Then reopen your claim because that means the person missed the shifting of a cradle or engine support.

So, that concludes our cars making noise segment. Now you saw how hard it was. It wasn't too difficult, but it wasn't really easy, but you just gotta take your time. Take your time, focus on where the noise is coming from, really listen. Put the windows up, take your car for a ride through parking lots and bumps, whatever you need to do, and then go for it. You can do it. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. Don't forget to ring that bell, it turns on all your notifications so you won't miss another video.