Haiku TDI
Veteran Member
After backing out of my driveway, I shifted into first and cut the wheel to the left to get my car parallel to the road that we would travel along. I feel like it took a great deal more motion than usual to get the car in the direction it needed to be going. 30 feet later at the intersection I took a left, and once again it felt like I was turing the steering wheel around and around far more than usual. However, slight corrections, lane changes, things like that feel almost fine, but there is definitely a bit more play in the wheel than usual. I did run my errands and driving about town things seem, for the most part, fine.
Last night after I initially posted this to the east coast people as I wanted to know if this could be temp. related - it is finally really cold in NH and this was the first time I noticed a dramatic difference. There were hypotheses about steering fluid (it is not low, it is, in fact over full), the bolts holding the steering rack to the frame, and the ball joints.
The car is a '98 Jetta TDI. It has 89K on it.
When I felt that the car was not handling quite right, PeterV looked at it and that day we determined something was up with the tie rod ends - and indeed those did need to be replaced. The car has new tires on it as of October. The ball joints were checked at that time. Tie rod ends were done in December thanks to meganuke, and IBW wiggled the tires about to confirm that the problem was the tie rod ends and not the ball joints. Alignment was done a few weeks later by the guys who put the new tires on the car.
Last night after I initially posted this to the east coast people as I wanted to know if this could be temp. related - it is finally really cold in NH and this was the first time I noticed a dramatic difference. There were hypotheses about steering fluid (it is not low, it is, in fact over full), the bolts holding the steering rack to the frame, and the ball joints.
The car is a '98 Jetta TDI. It has 89K on it.
When I felt that the car was not handling quite right, PeterV looked at it and that day we determined something was up with the tie rod ends - and indeed those did need to be replaced. The car has new tires on it as of October. The ball joints were checked at that time. Tie rod ends were done in December thanks to meganuke, and IBW wiggled the tires about to confirm that the problem was the tie rod ends and not the ball joints. Alignment was done a few weeks later by the guys who put the new tires on the car.