Springy Things Went Sprung

[partsguy]

Well, I have been gone for the past two days because of car trouble. I was backing out of the driveway when all of a sudden my car makes a loud bang noise and drags the ground. I thought I ran over something. My daily driver is an '02 Taurus SES V6 and it is very low to the ground. With a driveway from 1955, it bottoms out if I don't pull out just right so I thought surely nothing serious could have happened. Turned out I blew a tire. Great, no biggie. I realize that trying to jack it up isn't going to happen as the car is on the hump of the driveway and pushing it up the driveway is impossible. So I have one option: drive it into the garage, dragging and all. Long story short, I jack it up and I hear a lound clunk sound. I reach my hand in and I find that I can shake my coil spring. Yes folks, I broke a coil spring.

HOW?! As a kid, we had an '89 Tarurus, two Dodge Shadows ('90 and '93), '98 Stratus, '02 Cavalier Z24, 2002 Corolla and an '09 Escape. The Taurus got traded in on the Stratus due to high miles, both Shadows were driven until the day they died many thousands of miles later, Cavalier was totaled, and the Stratus is undergoing a little TLC at 265,296 miles. NONE OF THOSE CARS EVER HAD THIS HAPPEN! Heck, the Dodge still has its original suspension and its like new!

What gives? Neither my dad nor mom had this happen either when they were kids. $500 later and the problem should be fixed and done tomorrow. These past two days have been a train wreck for the most part. The cheap, shotty, garbage quality of the Chinese metalurgy in today's cars makes me sick!

 

[partsguy]

Oh, and I did put my spare on and drive it out to park in the street for the day with one inch of clearance and the spring dragging all the way. My mother was with me as we were going to Autozone to get the parts to do her front brakes. How IRONIC?!

 

[outskirtscustoms]

Man that sucks, I had an '85 Blazer that had a similar problem, the torsion bar on the driver side that holds the front end up broke then about a month after I replaced it the other one went. Then about 6 months later the trans lost reverse and started slipping. I was about to pour gas on it and light a match.

 

[partsguy]

Ford had coil spring problems for several years. Lots of them broke. They did have a 10 year replacement warranty on them for awhile. If you paid someone else to fix it, call Ford and tell them they owe you money. I don't know what they'd do, but they were fixing them for free--unless that ran out.

Ford did have a solution. They wanted you to bring in your car and they placed a guard around the springs so if they broke, it wouldn't poke the tire and send you across the highway to run head-on into a family of four. You still had a broke spring, but it was less dangerous. Yep.

I had a spring that broke also. When I got the "guard thing" recall notice, I looked at the springs and they looked brand new with no rust or anything so I figured there wasn't a problem. However, one of my springs broke while sitting in a parking lot, not even moving--which was a good thing as the spring poked right into the tire. Had I moved forward it would have punctured the tire. The spring still looked new with no rust, but it snapped right in half.

My car was ten years and three weeks old, so Ford would not replace the springs under warranty. I did it myself. Replacing front struts on those year Taurus' really is not fun which is why it cost so much.

I have one year of automotive training at MVCTC. I decided to go into business. Why work for the shop when you can own the shop? LOL! Anyway, One car we did was a 1993 Taurus. It was an alignment but even then it was a pain. We hed to drill out the welds on the mount plates up front and it took forever! We were quoted at $800 (I thought that was low!) the total was really $610 or something like that. I'l have the car back soon. I apologize to anyone who was waiting on me to ship stuff. I'd use the Monark, but then again, I lost the master link to my chain. I've been cleaning house all day to try and find it with no luck thus far.