Okay, so I noticed that the wheel on the passenger side of my car wasn’t as centered as the wheel on the drivers side. It looked to be about a half inch closer towards the door. I did a few searches and found that the most common issue was the lower control arm being bent. I pulled my control arm and can’t really tell if it is bent or not. In my opinion it does look kind of bent closer to where the ball joint goes in but I have nothing to compare it to. Here are some pictures. Let me know what you guys think. TIA!
and here is an image i found from a site that sells an aftermarket replacement
Looks straight to me… did you hit a curb at high speed recently? Don’t think those things are that easy to bend unless you ram into something at supersonic speed… shrug
nothing has been hit since I’ve owned the car but I know the previous owner had an accident with the car. I just noticed this because I was doing some front end work on the car. I looked at everything and can’t seem to figure out what is damaged. I think the cross member might be the culprit as it has a few dings in it. Maybe I’ll just pick up a traction bar and hope that fixes the issue.
Yeah, the lca appears to be straight. An issue with your front crossmember or radius rod could definitely be the culprit.
Getting an alignment would help you determine what is off and how far it is off. For instance, you said the passenger side front wheel is further back. Well, how do you know that the passenger side is messed up and is further back than normal? Maybe the passenger side is fine and the driver side is further FORWARD than normal… Not saying that’s the case, just something to consider until you are able to confirm certain things.
An alignment would be a great start, you could compare to the stock caster specs and see if that indicates anything. Another good place to start would be to check the front crossmember and radiator support for any damage which looks like it could be pushing the passenger side back. And then after inspecting that I would remove the radius rods to check the bushings, sleeves, and washers which affix them to the crossmember to see if all that is OK.
thanks for your input. im quite sure that the issue is with the passenger side because it just doesn’t look right with the wheel that far back (even though it is just a half inch difference from the other side). I tried to remove the radius rod from the crossmember but it is seized solid. I jumped up and down on a breaker bar and couldn’t budge it (the nut on the crossmember end).
i replaced the lower control arm, which was visibly bent
replaced radius rod, which was also obviously bent
still couldn’t get things to line up, when i noticed one of the mounts on the subframe was “tweaked”
what wasn’t lining up for you? were you able to get everything together but it just wasn’t centered in the wheel well? could you tell the mount was tweaked visually or did you have to measure?
