Is my driver side rear strut blown? Or something else?

[GinNBoost]

Hopefully someone can help me out with this. Yesterday while driving to a friend's house, I hit a pothole and all of a sudden I heard this loud bang coming from my rear driver side strut. Then as I kept driving along all I could hear was a very loud banging and clunking coming from that same location. It seemed like something was loose or wiggling around and hitting the frame of the car. I finally reached my friend's house and I took a look at the strut tower and it looked normal, but then as I pushed the car up and down, I could see it start moving around, almost like it was loose. On the way home, I still heard the loud banging and clunking the entire ride whenever I hit a bump...My rear struts (KYB GR2s) are only about a year old, and the passenger side rear is fine. Could something have snapped that would cause the tower to collapse into the wheel well? My strut towers are pretty rusted in the rear... Any help would be appreciated because I'm scared to drive my car anywhere now.

 

[jtmcinder]

Odds are, you blew out the upper shock bushing. It's an easy fix, if you have a spring compressor. The only question is whether you have damaged the shock driving around with it banging into the chassis.

Did you really keep driving in a non-emergency situation with all that noise? If so, please don't do that. Next time it could be four out of five lug nuts or a control arm.

- Jtoby

 

[thekellbeast]

Mine did the same thing last year. The factoy shock mounts were all rusted out and when I hit a pothole the rear passenger side broke. Same symptoms as what you're saying. All of my shocks were blown anyways, so I ended up just replacing the entire suspension with GC coilovers on Koni yellow shocks, with RRE pillow ball uppers to replace the factory mounts. It wasn't just the bushing that failed on mine, it was the entire metal mount.

 

[boostnbuds]

i agree ^^ sounds like the shock mount....dont by new shocks . i had a mazda on the lift the other day and as im raising it i hear a loud bang, the shock mount snapped in half and caused the shock and spring to float around freely. its a fairly common failure point so check it out.

 

[thekellbeast]

.dont by new shocks . .

WTF Factory gear sucks. Upgrade that shit.

 

[timloomis]

Now whats fun is when one side locks up and one side is blown. That happened on the front of my tsi. I took the blown one off and the rod just fell into the strut body. You'll figure it out, you have to take it all off anyways.