Squeal sound from right front wheel well when making left turns.

[George Selby]

At 03:40 PM 8/2/02, you wrote:
>Any ideas before I go to the mechanic? I am afraid they like to just
>replace
> >things until the problem goes away. $$$

In defense of mechanics here (because I am one):

A customer comes in with a clunk or squeak that is suspension related.  You
look under the car, and every part is worn to some degree and all the boots
and rubber parts are cracked or split.  Now it is more than likely that
only one part is causing the particular noise problem the customer is
complaining about.  However, it is generally much more time and cost
efficient to replace everything at once.  Parts are available as kits, with
significant savings over the price of each individual part.  Furthermore,
since the suspension has to be disassembled in a major way to replace most
individual parts, it is cheaper labor wise to replace everything together,
and sometimes parts are not successfully removable without destroying them
(old ball joints come to mind.)

So it actually saves money to do everything together, and as a side benefit
it reduces customer complaints.  By this I mean if you repair one
suspension part, it is likely the same part on the other side will fail
within a year, and make a similar sound to when the first part went
bad.  The customer comes back and claims you did shoddy work, the noise is
back, and they don't believe you when you tell them, "I told you you should
have replaced all these parts when I had your car last time."  Also, if you
replace suspension parts one by one over a year's time as each goes bad in
succession, you never notice the improvement, whereas if you do a complete
front end (for example) the customer will come back and say, "Wow, I really
notice the difference, it feels like I'm driving a new car, I don't know
how I didn't notice all this stuff was worn out."


George Selby
gselby4x4 at earthlink.net