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Forester: Strange noise from front wheel

Hi everybody

On the way to work this morning in my 2000 Forester S Turbo, there was a moderately loud "bang" from the front left side of the car.

Oh, I thought, just a stone hitting the inside of the wheel arch. The road had recently been re-surfaced, there was quite a lot of loose gravel around.

About 100 yards further on and a strange, scraping whine starts coming from the front wheel. Sounds like the disc has cracked or something equally nasty. I'm getting worried.

I pull over, and have a good look at the wheel. Nothing obviously wrong, no bits fallen off, nothing loose, the disc and pads appear to be fine (simply looking through the holes between the alloy spokes). I decided to limp slowly on to my workplace, only half a mile further. The car feels fine, brakes perfectly OK.

Lunchtime, & I jack up the car and remove the wheel. There's definitely nothing wrong with the disc, pads or calipers, but you can hear the sraping noise simply by rotating the hub by hand.

Five more minutes, and I spot the problem: A tiny stone has got lodged between the inner face of the brake disc and the steel hub plate. Ten seconds with a screwdriver and it is gone, problem solved.

Phew. I thought that was going to cost me big bucks.....

Cheers

MH

Reply to
MH
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Did I ever tell the story about the time I came home from a trip, and that next morning my wife got stuck in an intersection...the car wouldn't go forward. Turns out the right-outside brake pad was gone. Gone, completely missing. As in, caliper frame-on-rotor. WTF?

It only cost me a new rotor and a basic brake job, fortunately. That pad HAD to make a helluva racket coming out, but apparently nobody noticed.

-John O

Reply to
John O

I had a similar incident with my daughter's Civic. She got a flat tire, and after we got it changed that corner of the car made a hellacious racket. It turned out that her good-intentioned boyfriend had somehow bent the sheetmetal guard behind the rotor to where it was rubbing on the rotor.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

I had a very similar thing happen on my old '02 WRX, except in my case it seemed to happen on its own while I was driving through extremely heavy snow conditions. I think snow got packed in there and bent it up. The weird thing in my case was it was intermittent--only when the car was away from mechanics. How annoying!

Finally an enterprising mechanic at the dealership got the idea to take a peek and found the plate was bent, he bent it back, no charge, all's well.

Reply to
k. ote

Speaking of snow, I got in trouble in high school for driving the Ford Falcon through a snowbank. A big clump of snow/ice hit the clutch release lever and popped out the clutch linkage. My dad was not at all pleased.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Now, that was a nice car, albeit underpowered! An old boyfriend of mine drive his family's, which had a 4-on-the-column shift, and he let me drive it, too. Great experience. The car got bartered away for plumbing work.

Reply to
KLS

Ours was "three-on-the-tree"

Yeah, if you want to know how a boy turns into a man, ask his first car.

You have the same initials as my wife.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

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