Just thought I'd share...

[Huw Powell]

Last night I hit a tire on the Southeast Expressway doing about 50-60
mph... I didn't even see it due to the vagaries of traffic.  There was a
big BANG that I thought was me hitting the mother of all potholes, and
then things felt a little wrong so I pulled over hard to the left and
put on the 4-ways (there are no break down lanes on this wonderfully
nasty road).

I hopped out expecting to see a flat, already dreading changing the
spare on with cars whipping by at 60, making emergency lane change
manouvers to avoid me.

No flat (!) ... but, the left front tire was sticking out at a rather
awkward angle... oops.  If you've ever seen pictures of a compound
fracture of a bone (or suffered one), this looked rather similar.

A couple of tows later the patient is in the operating room so I can
figure out what is wrong.  The basic malady is that the strut housing
(upper half) of the two piece strut/bearing housing assembly tore right
off the lower bolt holding it to the bearing housing.

The outer cv boot got gouged up a bit by shrapnel, and the upper strut
bearing looks a bit lopsided.  It remains to be seen whether the
Bilstein suffered from getting jammed into the inside of the wheel
well!  Oddly enough, the ball joint looks fine, as does the tie rod and
tie rod end.  The brake caliper just went along for the ride, too.

The car was even, in a very awkward sense, driveable... but more
interesting than my wondering how far I could have driven it with one
tire travelling sideways (home? 75 miles!?), was that with the front
wheel basically broken off, the car handled just fine...

--
Huw Powell

http://www.humanspeakers.com/

http://www.humanthoughts.org/