Doing This Will Make Your Car's Suspension Last Forever

Rev up your engines, well today we got a Lincoln that's making noise, so we're going to try to figure it out, here we go, of course I'm in the car, it doesn't want to make noises now, but there we go, that's the muffler hitting the pipe in the back of the road, that's nothing, that's just a big hump in front of my house, that's the doors locking, of course it won't make that noise for me, we're going to jack it up and look at it anyways, we'll go back in and we'll drive up and down the drive, see if it'll make a sound, it's not the bells from the church, all right it won't make the noise, so we're going to take the wheels off and look at it, here's the noise more from the left front, so we got the jack under the jack point, the emergency brake on, well we got a jack up in here, we'll put the jack stand in before we take the tire off, but first thing we're going to do, see if there's any play, no, there's no play, there's nothing going there, so in goes the jack stand, and we'll take the wheel off, got a little flashlight and look around, hey check it out, isn't this interesting, this is a Lincoln mkx, look the shock system, which is pretty complex, it's made in Japan, but the vehicle's made in Mexico, you figure that one out, it's an international car, often brake pads will make a noise, but as we can see, the brake pads are still pretty thick, they're not even near being worn down, you can see there's a lot of pads still left in there, this is at lower speeds, and as you can see, unlike the olden days, there's no grease fittings, these bushings are all naked rubber bushings, right they're all naked rubber bushings, and they will often creak as they age, so we got some wd-40 here, it says stop squeaks and it often does, what we want to do is, all these rubber bushings, we want to soak them good, because they will often creak, especially these torsion bars here, the only thing that's holding the torsion bar to the frame of the car, is those two bolts, and there's a rubber bushing, and they will often creak, and down here, you can see here's some more rubber bushings, same thing, it's metal and rubber, and of course, there's a big giant body one there, that's the problem with modern cars, back in the day, when I was young, all those things had grease fittings on them, when you change the oil mechanics, like myself, and the grease gone, we'd grease them up, and that kept them from creaking, well they don't have grease fittings, it's rubber on metal, eventually the rubber gets a little old and dried out, and then it'll make horrible creaking noises, now if there's something physically wrong, one you're generally going to feel a clunk, which we didn't, and something physically wrong, your tires are going to wear strange, you can see these tires have worn pretty evenly, and there's no scalloped edges really or anything on it, so that shows the front ends in pretty good shape, and speaking of that, check this side out, because the mechanic looked at it and said the tires weren't uneven, I can see it's a inside, we're going to look at this to see if there's something mechanically wrong, now the owner just told me something interesting, this is a good tip, when you talk to your mechanic, tell them everything you notice, because he says, you know I notice when it's raining I don't hear it, well voila, rubber when it's wet, it's slipperier, and it doesn't make the noise, if you got a car that creaks, but when it rains, the creaking goes away, the water is getting in those rubber bushings, and it's lubricating it, so it doesn't creak, so this is obviously a problem, this will probably get rid of it, now sometimes if you get rid of most of it, or if it comes back, you can go even heavier duty, you can go buy that AT205 reseal that I talked about, I don't have any lying around here now, but you can buy that, and it's a polymer that rejuvenates the rubber, and you can spray all those rubber things, WD-40 does the same thing, the only problem with WD-40 is, if it rains a lot, it'll wash off, but the AT205 is a polymer, and it's absorbed by the rubber, and makes it more supple, so it works a little bit better, but this will stop the noise, and if it goes away, and then comes back later, you can spray it every once in a while, or do the AT205 treatment, so here we go to the other side, probably jack this wheel out and see what's going on, just enough so that the wheels off the ground, guides off the ground, take a look, and as you can see, here's the outer tread, see how thick it is, here's the inner tread, some of it is down to the wear bar, so there's a problem back here, for some reason, it's wearing the inside, it's also when I put my hand on it, it's scalloped on the inside, but it's not scalloped on the outside, on this side of the other side, you can see the other side, it doesn't have that wear, it's all evenly worn over there, so the problem only exists on this side, now he bought it used 45,000 miles or so ago, and he noticed the car, in fact the car had been stolen, I'm assuming that when it was stolen, that thing got whacked up or something, because the alignment is off on this back wheel, now this is a pretty complex setup on this vehicle, but the caster and camber on the rear end can actually be adjusted, many cars are cheaper made these days, they have no adjustments on them, and if you hit a curb or something, things are bad, start forking out for control arms, bearings, all kinds of stuff, now this thing doesn't make a noise, and it's just wearing the inside on this one side, so that means the other side the alignment is perfect, all it needs is an alignment on this side, you find a good alignment guy, and you hope that there's enough alignability on the caster and camber, because sometimes if something's bent too much, and by too much when we're talking about front-end alignment, we're talking like thousands of an inch here or there, you can only adjust a little bit, but just aligning it could help, because it doesn't have any particular play or anything like the other wheel did, neither of them had play, it doesn't make any noise, if you had a bad wheel bearing you hear it go roar roar roar, and it's not, and it took a lot of mileage for it wear out like that, so an alignment should certainly be able to fix this, if there's enough room to align it, now on the other hand, let's say a guy says, well we got it close, but we can't align it perfectly, because the control arms bent too far or something, it's going to cost a fortune, in that case tell him to set as good as he can, and just buy cheaper tires, I had a customer with a bmw that did that for five years, her bmw kind of looked like a crab at the back at the end, the way it was going with its tire sideways, but it was going to cost her 2,500 bucks to fix all that rear, and she just bought tires, now they cost more today, but back in those days she was buying 65 tires, and they'd last her like eight ten thousand miles, and she'd buy another set of tires for the back, it didn't affect the front, it only affected the back, so since this is only one tire, first get it aligned, if they can align it, great that fixes the problem, if it doesn't, they say, well it's going to cost all this money, hey just keep buying tires, this thing as it stands it still handles good, it doesn't make a lot of noise, but as you can see, as we look inside, it's a very complex system, I mean look, sensors on the shock, you got a nice torsion bar set up here, and we look back in there, you can see it's got solid control arms bolted to the frame, there's your adjustments, so you can adjust it, and you can see they're totally adjustable, and all it would take is that bar in there, right there with the threads on it, if it got hit when it was stolen, that could be just ever so slightly bent, and they could adjust it, now you might find a guy will say, well that bar is bent, so we got to replace that bar, okay that bar just bolts on and off, it's a simple job, you don't have to worry about it, now being 2019, this is the last year that they made them, they were all made at my friend's place in Oakville Ontario, hi Tony if you're still there, I don't know why they stopped making them, I mean they're a nice size SUV, he loves it, he uses it for driving people all over the place, and it's black, it's nice, people like riding around in it, but for some reason they just decided, well we're not going to make these things anymore, it's a very competitive segment, there's no arguing that, and I guess Ford got to the point that, they're selling the vehicle that he gets 19 miles a gallon in, and most people are thinking, they want better gas mileage or whatever, but Lincoln itself has made so many mistakes in the past, take their MKZ, they stopped making them too, but now they make the Z's which are just pretty much the same vehicle, but they're made in China and they're only sold in China, because they're still popular in China, the Chinese go for more luxury sedans than they do in the United States, but hey these were actually pretty decent, it doesn't have that horrendous 10 speed that Ford uses in a bunch of their stuff, it's got a pretty reliable transmission, if you saw one of these used that was in good shape, it could still be an excellent car, but you know they just stopped making them in Oakville, and I guess Ford had this idea back then, when everybody was playing the green game, that well we're going to make a bunch of electric cars in there in Canada and Oakville, and now that people aren't buying their electric cars, who knows, maybe they'll go back to building these things one day, you never know, stranger things have happened, these aren't bad, this one business car drives around, he loves it, he bought it secondhand, got a good deal on it, so if you're looking for an SUV, maybe you're really disgusted by the prices of what people want for the Lexuses and for the Acuros and for the Infinities, you could probably get one of these a lot cheaper, it could still be a decent vehicle, like this one is, hey it was stolen you know 50,000 miles ago, and it's still going strong, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that bell!