Why does my SL1 always do weird things during a holiday weekend? How does it know?

Anyway, my wife came home and said there was suddenly something wrong with the car’s alignment. I drove it and found that actually, when driving straight ahead, the steering wheel now wasn’t in its normal 12 o’clock position, but a little to the left, more like 10 o’clock.

Is it possible for the steering wheel to just slip from its normal position? It doesn’t feel like it’s loose. Can I just remove the wheel and reattach it in the proper place, or is this a symptom of something more serious?

I’d appreciate your thoughts… thanks a lot!

 

It is a symptom of something falling apart in the front suspension. Do not drive the car without further investigation. My car did that in January and the bolt that holds the lower ball joint to the front knuckle had fallen out. The ball joint had come halfway out of the knuckle.

 

Not accusing here, but did she possibly hit a curb?

 

A hefty pothole could also do it.

Also - if nothing found in front suspension - check rear. A broken trailing arm could do the same thing...

 

Could is be a broken steering coupler?

 

Could it be that he figured it out and never came back?

I hate when that happens.

 

Make a note of his user name and IP and if he tries to come back, go ahead and ban him, derf!

 

Too much effort to ban.

Sw2cam (previous mod) put every single person he ever banned in the admin group. Anger management issues I assumed.

 

Hey, I just came back to let you know what happened with my steering issue.

While I’m sorry to be late with a follow up, since my initial post I’ve been away on a trip and had both family and health issue to address. You might want to ease up on the hostility — you just never know what people might be dealing with.

As it turned out, after recently replacing a wheel bearing and hub, my mechanic forgot to perform an alignment. After my wife noticed the steering wheel slipping out of whack, they did the alignment and all is well again.

I do thank everyone for their thoughts and suggestions on my problem. It helped me out when discussing things with the mechanic shop.

Hope I don’t get banned!

 

If you are posting, you are not banned. You didn't do anything worthy of being banned so that won't happen on my watch.

Unfortunately, the regulars including myself on this forum are a bit jaded with respect to those who can't take 3 minutes to let us know if our advice helped or was completely off. And a thank you is appreciated but not required.

Typically when someone asks a question and gets advice and vanishes as far as we can tell, the post is then overrun with unrelated vitriol. It's not really pointed at the specific poster most of the time, just the situation that happens over and over and over.

you don't need to explain to us where you were. That's none of our business. We're just glad you stopped back to let us know what was up. And I am happy to know that you have dealt with the other issues in front of you.

After all we're just a small gang of middle aged guys that at one time were younger guys driving our Saturns when they weren't 25 and 30 years old. When people come to the forum, they are usually fourth fifth or 6th owners and truly don't know anything about their vehicles so we always try to remember that when working with people.

Please hang around. Contribute if you wish.

Peace
Derf