For a while now my car has been handling terribly, grabbing at bumps and camber on the road, occasioanlly seeming to wonder and a bit of a crap ride.

So a few weeks ago I had the wishbones changed and had the tracking done with a 4 wheel laser system, no luck it was still the same. A few days after that pulling out of a parking space I accelerated lightly on full lock and there was a bad grinding noise

Video

. So back into the garage the car goes n they say theres nothing wrong with it, so I thought id leave it until MOT time as the whole suspension would get a full check over. MOT time and they find nothing wrong with the front suspension but the car still handles badly on uneven surfaces on medium to heavy acceleration.

Just been for another look at the car tonight and its still making the noise and I found that on the left hand strut the spring dosnt seem to be sat in the cup properly and the second coil in the spring is closer to the first than the other side, if that makes sense lol.
Surely it should be equal both sides.

Right side





Left Side





So would it be that the shocks and springs are shot and that the spring is causing the noise? I really need to get this sorted out but no garage seems to be able or wanting to help.

Cheers

 

The springs should be butted up againstbthe end stops on the lower cups.
The handling and noise are not connected IMO.
It could be something as simple as tyre pressures being wrong, or even down to the make of tyre, grabbing and pulling over uneven surfaces is quite normal for some cars to do dependant on which tyres they have, some cars are more prone to this, than others, due to lots of different factors, how hard the suspension is is one of them.
It is immensley hard to determine where on the car the noise is coming from, but sounds more like, either areally bad wheel bearing allowing the disc to tilt and rub, or the transmission, it is too fast a grinding noise for driveshafts, but it would seem to be due to being worse on full lock.
My money would be on having a CLOSE look at the wheel bearing on the noisy side first.
tabetha

 

have the tracking checked, most set it to neutral,and this makes cossys tramline, set to 1 degree tow in.also check the top spring cups as these tend to wear oval,only 3 quid from ford.

 

cheers for the replys

Yesterday I put some new drop links on, put my Kumho tyres from the back onto the front (instead of the pirelli p5000s) and beat the spring back into place with a hammer and it seems to have cured the noise and the cars handling a bit better. I just need to find out why the spring was trying to slip out like that now.