Thankyou in advance for your help.

My steering creaks when I turn the wheels, I can barely turn it and it will creak once, or if I keep turning it it will keep creaking like an old door, it is very audible, even with my cutout open. Also, if I lift the car so that the front wheels are off the ground, no creak at all while turning the wheel. A mechanic I know told me that it's possible I could have bad or loose strut mounts in the front, but I'm not sure how to check for that. As far as I know the car has not had any suspension work done as the stock deCarbons are still in place Also, car has about 110,000 on the chassis, as long as I'm in there what should I replace, stuff like bushings and ball joints and tie rod ends and such.

Thanks again,
James

 

With 110K miles you're probably in need of suspension replacement. I'd look over everything (tie rod ends, leaking shocks, sway bar end link bushings, upper/lower control arm bushings, etc).

 

Yea I have new tie rod ends sitting in my garage right now so I'll probably do those first and then I think I'll start doing bushings and making sure everything is torqued down to proper specs. The weird thing is it just started a few weeks ago from driving in the snow.

 

Think about what moves when you turn the steering wheel.... tie rod ends and ball joints. The fact that the creak disappears when there is no load on the suspension might be pointing to ball joints.

Tell your mechanic there are no "strut mounts" on a 4th Gen F-Body. Struts were used on the 3rd Gens, but not the 4th's.

 

Makes sense I'll change em out today and see what happens.

 

Well after doing outer tie rod ends and lower ball joints, the creaking was still there. I put the car back up on ramps and had someone turn the wheel very slow, and noticed that the steering rack was moving a very very small amount, such as if you left the wheel for a second, then turned it in either direction, or going any distance from side to side, tightened the bolts down about 10-15lbs past torque specs according to the haynes manual and bye-bye creak. So if anyone else has this problem that's what solved it for me. Car does ride a bit nicer now since the tie rod ends were shot to hell and the ball joints weren't too good off either. Thanks for the ideas guys.

James

 

dont forget the upper ball joints.