300M still clunks

However, as I pointed out earlier, you can rule sway bar bushings and end links in or out as the cause with 100% certainty by simply removing one end link from the vehicle (i.e., totally unloading the sway bar) and seeing if the noise stays or goes away when you drive it.

If the noise does not occur with the one end link removed, then that proves that one or more bushings and or end links are bad. If the noise still happens with the end link removed, then the noise is elsewhere.

And yes - to pay a shop to do that experiment is just going to add to the total cost of getting to a solution - unless it proves that the bushings/end links are the problem, and it might be a good idea at that point to have them just replace them (except, again, paying a shop to do it with their greatly inflated parts costs is liable to cost an additional couple of hundred dollars instead of the well-under-$100 and

If it solves the problem, then it will have been worth it. If it doesn't, you still have the problem, but you at least have ruled those parts out.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

I said lift but I presume it was on a rack. I'll double check but I don't think they are that dumb.

As far as recouping money spent, some of the initial problem developed as a result of a extra deep pothole which the dealer handled as an extended service agreement issue. They could have declined to do so so I figure I am still about even at this point.

There was a time that I used to do this stuff myself but I kind of gave that up. I also used to have a riding lawn mower. I pay a lawn service now. Just a question of priorities as you age.

Art, never underestimate stupidity! You should have learned that in your

This is just my observation, but most service departments -rapidly- lose interest in fixing a vehicle that has a MINOR problem that only shows up for the owner. You need to see it from their perspective. An owner comes in complaining of a problem, they test drive it and find nothing. So now their choices are to return it to the owner, without doing anything to it, or to dump more time and money into looking for this problem. No matter what they pick to do they are screwed. If they can't find anything and give the car back to the owner with a big bill, the owner gets pissed and tells everyone what price gouging moneygrubbers they are. If they give it back to the owner without charge, then they lose money, and the owner runs around telling everyone they are incompetent. If they keep looking the most likely thing is they will still find nothing, and now will lose even more money on labor.

The upshot is that since they know they are going to be screwed no matter what they do, the usual choice is to just do nothing and tell the owner they spent a whole lot of time looking for the problem.

Ted

Oh I feel you on that, Art. I'm facing having to replace the evaporator in my Concorde - requires pulling the dash completely out. I have a choice of doing something that I know I have no business doing or taking it to a run-of-the-mill shop knowing I will pay thru the nose and end up with nusiance problems due to improper re-assembly for the remainder of the life of the car (unless i can get back in there and find and fix the causes - in which case i mught as well have done it myself at the beginning). The proverbial catch 22.

BTW - I'm right behind you - I still cut my own grass so far.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

The Dodge dealer is trying to show up the Chrysler dealer 2 blocks away. I think they are really trying to solver the problem.

I once had a 76 or 77 Malibu. I don't remember which any more. It was the first GM downsized product and my first new car. Like many new Chevy's, the speedometer started chirping a few weeks after ownership. I brought it to the dealer to have the cable replaced. When I picked it up I was greeted by all kinds of clicks and rattles from the dashboard. That weekend I disassembled the dash down to the speedometer. GM in their engineering wisdom had used a different size screw for each layer of the dashboard. The blind technician who made the repair must have made one neat piles of screws and used them randomly during reassembly. It was easy to do the job right... all you had to do is count the screws and the holes since each layer required not only a different size but a different number of screws. After I was done, no more clicks.

I think the service departments have improved a lot since those days. But yes, I did have to bitch to the Chrysler dealer on 2 occassions to get the plastic wiper cowl on correctly and to get the steering wheel straight. But hopefully the stuff underneath the car was properly assembled.

I spent about $900 at Chrysler and I told the Dodge dealer I will cover diagnosis time. If I was keeping the car, I would just be driving it until the clunk got bad enuf to be easy to diagnose but we are giving it to my in-laws, hopefully troube free.

You don't know what your talking about - you abviously haven't tried it (and if you were uncertain about it, it was probably a good idea not to). Absolutely nothing hits anything. It's a completely valid test for an LH car.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

philthy wrote:

Welcome to Philthy's world!

That was one of the few jobs that actually did send me to a shop in the last 20 years- the evaporator core on Wifey's 93. For the most part, though, I tend to still be of the "if you want it done right, do it yourself" philosophy. Especially for routine maintenance- I figure every time you darken the door of most shops for an oil change, its just begging for some form of incidental damage. Not the fault of the shop so much as the culture- gotta get 'em in and out in a hurry to keep the profits up. I don't have that problem in my own garage and can take my time and not make hasty mistakes.

But more and more, I am tempted to farm out the "bigger" jobs. I did have a transmission rebuilt by a shop a couple years ago- that kind of thing.

I'll consider myself worthless to society and suitable only for the glue factory if I quit cutting my own grass any time before I'm 80. That's one thing I've really never understood paying someone else to do, even though lots of my contemporaries (and people younger than I) do so.

Have you considered that it may not be a "clunk" at all, but more of a "pop" caused by rubber bushings adhering to the stabilizer bar and then popping loose? I've had that happen a whole lot, more often with polyeurethane bushings than rubber, but rubber isn't immune. Squirting silicone lubricant or "graphite" powder lubricant (which is usually molybdenum disulfide, not real graphite) into the area where the bushing clamps around the bar usually stops it... at least for a while.

That is a possibility. Thanks.

What killed me on the grass mowing is a ridiculous incline on the lot in our latest house and too many 99 degree days in central NC. I did it for several years at the new house but frankly it took me a couple of days to recover and it just wasn't worth it any more to me when for $80 per month to a lawn service I could make room in my garage for better toys. The pro's use a $4000 mower and they barely sweat the hill.

Bill, I don't think that any commercial mechanic has any business disassembling a dashboard. If you really want to take it somewhere, why not just buy the evaporator, disconnect it from the connections in the engine bay, then drive the car over to a well-ranked body shop? They deal with stuff like this all the time since that's were everyone takes their cars to have the dashes fixed after the thieves destroy them getting the radio out.

I made the mistake once of being lazy and paying someone to replace a smashed dash. Never again. Not only were there rattles and such, but many of the plastic mounting tabs and such were completely broken off, so pulling it back out and doing it right wasn't an option anymore. And this was a GM product, as a matter of fact.

What really pissed me off royally was that when I took the car in I spent almost 10 minutes telling the guy how difficult this job was going to be BEFORE asking him for a quote, and he brushed me off with an estimate I thought was way low, and the comment "Oh this will be easy and won't take much time" Then when I picked up the car he had the nerve to bitch about how much money he has lost on the job since it took way longer than he expected.

Ted

It used to clunk a lot more. It is impossible to know whether there were multiple sources of clunks, most of which were fixed, or whether one source that was partially fixed. This is an impossible situation for me and for the dealers. If I weren't trying to give the car trouble free to my in-laws, I would just drive it now with the occassional clunk until it was more regular and easy to diagnose. In any case I will be giving up soon.