Any advice on what could be wrong with my 96 Legacy Brighton based on the following description?
When I go in reverse and turn sharply, for example to parallel park, I can hear a shudder and the car behaves as if it had hexagonal wheels: it jerks and hesitates to roll. I can't really tell if the noise is coming from the front or the back. Driving in the city and on highway I did not notice anything weird with the drivetrain (doesn't pull to one side and it makes no noise when turning in the streets). To get more details on the problem, I did the following test.
- if I go forward (on an empty parking lot) and turn the wheels all the way to one side I can make 3 or 4 full circles without any problems but after that, the car starts exhibiting the above mentioned jerking and shudder similar to what one experiences when a front axle is gone bad on a FWD car.
2 if I do the same, but going in reverse, I can also make a few rounds with no noise or problems but after the 5th turn the shudder and noise increase to the point that one can barely drive the car. It rolls very rough, it produces an awful sound (as if something is being ground down), brutal. It even stalled on me once as if I had a parking brake on. After doing several circles and upon hearing and feeling this problem I stopped the car and got out (wheels fully turned), only to see that the car jerks forward (slightly) about every second. I could hear something turning and hitting in the same rhythm as the car was jerking. As soon as I straightened the wheels and drove straight, the noise and roughness was gone.
Could this be a worn/bad axle and how would one figure out what side and if it is front or back?
Could it be the differential? Front or back? How to tell/test?
Anything else that could produce the above mentioned symptoms?
Please help with your advice before I turn to the dealer for inspection/repair.
(My Legacy is AWD, 2.2l, 173k km, manual(clutch near the end of its life), front right axle replaced more than 50k km ago, front diff/trans oil changed
10k km ago, rear diff not checked recently)