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LCA recall.

4K views 7 replies 4 participants last post by  osirus 
#1 ·
I recently took my traction bars off and 2day I noticed a clicking noise coming from my front left tire. When I installed my traction bars I had to drill the hole out to make a bigger bolt fit (people who installed these know what I'm talking about). When these were uninstalled I kept the bigger bolt in so it would be a snug fit. Any reason why I should have this clicking noise?
Would me installing these bigger bolts fix the recall or be at fault?
 
#2 · (Edited)
The hole you had to drill out bigger was an empty hole in the Lower Control Arm. That should have no affect on anything related to the LCA recall. The rear bolt in the LCA is replaced when you install traction bars with a longer bolt to accomodate the heim join in the traction bars. I'm unclear why when you removed them you would have left the longer bolt in the rear, the stock bolt is more than sufficiently long to go through and be torqued to the appropriate spec.

With the LCA the issue is primarily with the front bolt which does not go all the way through the attaching point but instead screws into a threaded hole in the lower cradle. The recall addresses the fact that they used the same length bolt for the front and rear attaching point and it wasn't quite long enough for the front. I've heard some people mention a stronger bolt as well. I'm not sure about that because the bolt grade is 10.9 on both the original and the new so unless the originals didn't actually meet spec I'm not sure about a harder bolt.

That being said after the winter I heard a slight popping in the front so I took my car in to have the LCA repair done. After I got it back the sound was still there. I noticed that the heim joints on the traction bar were slightly corroded from the winter so I thought I would take them off just to try and eliminate things from the problem. When I took them off the sound got much worse so I looked around some more and found that after the repair the left front bolt attaching the LCA wasn't torqued correctly and I couldn't torque it to spec so I took the car back in. The threads in the lower cradle had actually stripped out so they ordered me a new cradle and no more popping.

As for the traction bars, I haven't reinstalled them because I decided to compete in SCCA Solo this year and I didn't want to move to the category that they would place me in.

Hope some of this helps.
 
#3 ·
thanx for the input, I ended up reusing the longer, bigger bolt becuase 1. I lost the old,smaller bolts and 2. It didnt make sense to me to put smaller bolts back in after I drilled the hole larger. I think im just going to go under the car and make sure everythings tight.
 
#5 ·
The threads in the lower cradle had actually stripped out so they ordered me a new cradle and no more popping.
THat is pretty darn serious because it pretty much ties the whole K-member in there.

Yikes! Good thing you found it!
 
#8 ·
I actually went under the car 2day, the (longer) bolt that bwoody supplied me with was just loose, I had to nig rig it b4 to make it catch thread. I went to Menards and bought the bolts I needed and everything seems good now
 
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