What's up everyone? Welcome back to The Durbin Compound! If you haven't met me already,
my name is Devin Durbin. So we're back on another Troubleshooting Tuesday. I hope that you find
value in my videos. And if you do, I would love a comment below. And please consider subscribing,
so we can hang out more here on the channel. So, today we're going to figure out how to
tell if you have a bad tie rod, a bad ball joint, anything of those sorts. So, the Land Rover is
once again back in the shop. We have a little bit of a wander. So, what I mean by that is,
she will go to the right. You'll pull it back. Then she'll wander to the left. You'll pull it back,
she'll wander back to the right. So it just kind of seems like she's loose somehow in the front end.
She's not really tracking straight. Or even when you hold the steering wheel, it'll go one way or the other.
And it kind of bounced to and fro. So, I'm going to show you how to diagnose it.
We're going to figure out what tie rod is bad, which I think is a tie rod. Usually those symptoms, dodging left
and then right, is usually a tie rod problem. It can also be a ball joint. So today we're going
to go over the steps on how to tell if you have a bad ball joint or a tie rod or maybe a drag link.
And it just depends on your setup. So, let's get down to it. I'll show you the first step.
Let's change camera angles and get after it.
All right, first things first, I want to point out in the video that that leak underneath the truck is not from the Land Rover.
It's from the power steering pump on the Corvette.
So, old seal going out and it just drips. So bless its heart. It drips all over the concrete.
So, now we're going to jack up the truck. I'm going to show you exactly what, you know,
a lot of mechanics do to diagnose the problem, and see what's going on here. So let's jack it up.
{sound of jack working}
I've got a little bit of a squeaky jack, huh? Okay, since I wasn't prepared, I went ahead and got two cloths and
my pry bar. So, one of the things that you want to do is, people will probably disagree,
you'll probably tear me apart in the comments. Really don't care what your opinion is, but this is how I do it.
I leave one wheel on the ground over there. A lot of times when you don't have
the other wheel on the ground, you can easily steer the axle, or steer both tires,
one way or the other. Sometimes a car or truck is harder to steer by hand, but when you're checking joints
and stuff like that, you want to make sure that tire on the other side has a little bit of resistance.
What we're trying to do here is figure out if you have play in your joint. So the first movement
is left to right. So we're trying to turn the tire. Okay? Give it a nice tug.
See if you can do anything by hand. If you can't do anything by hand, the next step is to put a pry bar
on it and see if it does anything that way, one way or another. Keep in mind that the weight of
the vehicle will change this test. So you doing it by hand is nowhere near the force of you actually
having the car on the ground. So, left to right is going to be testing your tie rods. So a tie rod end,
maybe a Pitman arm, the joint at your Pitman arm. It just depends. If you have a drag link setup
and you have a bar across that connects to two axles, and your steering only goes to only one side,
and then you have a drag link that connects the two, you're going to be, you know, checking all
those joints at once. So, you might be able to feel some hesitation, or some clicking, or a clunk
back and forth. If it's really bad you're really going to know. It's going to clunk, clunk back and forth.
I do not feel any movement side to side. One way is to put the pry bar in here. And you
can use your pry bar to put a little extra force on it, to kind of signify what the vehicle would
do with weight-wise. You put one in here. Of course, you don't want to put extreme amount of force on
your wheels, especially if you have an aluminum wheel or something like that. You literally just
want to be able to see if it rocks back and forth. And this one seems pretty tight. Now the next check
is to do up and down. What I mean by that is, the wheel this way. So this tests your ball joints.
You have a ball joint here and you have a ball joint here. They hold the knuckle from going this way or
that way. You can usually visually tell if a ball joint is bad by the tires leaning in,
or out is really bad, but you can usually tell if your tires are wearing weird or something like that.
You're going to know. And sometimes when you get bad ball joints and they fall in, and you have
a camber issue in the front, that's when you'll get that wander because you're
wearing the inside of the tire and it's just kind of walking. So we test up and down as well. And the
same kind of tests for that. We can put our rag in this way, put our pry bar in this way,
and make sure we don't mar up our wheels. And we can try it up and down. And I have no movement.
So I'm good there. Okay? So, it appears that it is good on this side. I'm going to check the other side.
I'm going to do a time lapse through it. And I'm not going to bore you with exactly what I did here.
We're going to make this video short and sweet. So let's head over to the other side.
{music playing}
Okay, so I'm on the passenger side of the vehicle and I don't think that you're going to audibly be able to hear this,
but when I rotate it left to right, I have a little bit of a tinking sound. So I can
hear it back there somewhere. It sounds like a ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting when I'm moving
it back and forth. So, I know that there's something loose on the other side. One way you can diagnose this,
I'm going to show you. And then the other way you diagnose it is have someone underneath the car,
or on the other side of the tire, that can see that play in between that joint while you're moving it.
So, you know, sometimes you can do that with a ball joint. You can see what two pieces are moving.
This should be 100% tight. You should not be able to move it by hand.
If you can move it by hand, the truck is moving it a hundred times that much. So, I can
hear that tink-tink. So we definitely have what I think is a tie rod that's bad. We're going to
go underneath the truck and I'm going to show you how to diagnose it by yourself. Sometimes you will
not be able to move it by yourself. Sometimes you will be able to move it by yourself. I think that
at this point in time, how I feel the wander, I can definitely move it by myself,
I guarantee that. So, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you put weight on the back end, and you get some
weight off of the front end of a truck, it'll wander a lot more and a bad ball joint
will, you know, rear its ugly head. So, let's go underneath the truck and I'll show you just
the ways that you can check it by hand. And we'll see if we can figure out which one it is.
{music playing}
I'm not blocking a lot of light. Something important for videos is a lot of light.
So, what we're looking at here is, this is a Pitman arm end of the tie rod. So, first what I'm going to
do is, I'm literally just going to pull up and down on this. Get a firm grip on here and see if you
can move it by hand. So, I'm basically flexing the suspension on the truck. But literally
we're just looking for slop this way. So usually when a tie rod end or a ball joint fails,
you're going to have up and down play in it because if it wobbles this way, it has basically worn out
that cone in that joint. And that is, you know, going to allow it to slop around in the joint.
Sometimes it will. Sometimes it won't. But for the most part, you can tell if it's bad by doing this.
Okay, so hopefully you can audibly hear that tink noise. I'll try to make it louder.
Okay! So, what I can tell right now, by doing it on this end, is this end of the joint is not moving, where this
end of the tie rod is not moving. So, our joint is actually loose down here.
Okay, now we can make it a lot louder.
You should not be able to make any noise out of a tie rod end. So now we have found our culprit.
She's nice and loose on the end here. So, I've quickly diagnosed this just right here.
This end, if you didn't know what you were doing, it could make it seem like it was that end,
but actually it makes it, you need to check both ends. Don't rule out any conclusions. Literally can make
that noise with my finger. So, I won't bring the camera in closer because you're not going to see
any visual movement on the camera. But you can feel or you can easily make noise with it.
So now we've diagnosed that this is the tie rod in question. And now it's just up to ordering it
and getting it replaced. Too easy! So that's a Troubleshooting Tuesday. Figured out exactly
what was wrong. This is a good time to check all your other joints. Make sure your track arms are tight.
Make sure your drag link is tight. I can't move anything else. Don't be afraid to yank on
this stuff. It deals with the weight of the vehicle all the time, but should definitely not be able to
make that noise. Haha! Nice!
All right guys, so I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope that brought value to you
and some simple things that you don't even really need to have a jack to do exactly what I just did.
You don't need to have car ramps. You, you know, well you do need a jack
because you need to take the tire off the ground. But every car should have a jack in it with
your spare tire kit. So you can use the jack like that. You do not need to have any fancy floor jack.
Just make sure that, you know, you're staying out of those pinch points, just in case it falls off that
jack, or the vehicle moves. You need to practice all of the safety items before, you know, you go
out and get underneath the vehicle with it on a jack. Just remember that. Something like a tie rod end
can be replaced with it being on the ground 100%. So, with a ball joint
you're getting into a more difficult service. A lot of guys don't like to do them because
they are a pain in the butt. The right tools and the right mindset will get you anywhere when it
comes to troubleshooting this stuff and getting it repaired. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
I might do a video on how to replace the tie rod. If I end up doing a...come on fly! If I end up doing
a video on how to replace a tie rod, then I will link it here in the top right corner, so that you
can click on it in the future. So, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Please hit like and subscribe.
Comment if you want to. I'm sure somebody will have something bad to say about something I've done,
but whatever. All those keyboard warriors out there. So, keep on keepin' on. We'll see you guys next video.