- Dec 4, 2011
- 12,927
Per Roadie's recommendation after I mentioned this in another thread I'm posting this thread.
Friday early afternoon I was accelerating and merging onto a highway. Traffic was fairly heavy and the ramp was short, so I wasn't being light with the accelerator. I was focused more on traffic than potholes and, well, one was a doozy. I hit it hard and the end result just about threw me into the semi truck next to me and I had to catch the vehicle. Now I've hit harder bumps before but never really had one throw the vehicle like that. I caught it and realized that going straight the wheel was now cocked to the right, something just felt off in the back end, and when I would hit the gas more than just light-moderate it felt like it wasn't pushing the vehicle straight forward
It didn't pull to the side when I turned the wheel to go straight, but it was off a decent amount.
I got off the highway and pulled into a parking lot to check stuff out. Checked the front first of course and I didn't see anything obviously wrong. Started poking around the rear and found my rear upper passenger trailing arm is snapped off!
View attachment 20803
The rust is just surface rust, the metal is still plenty thick. When I replaced my rear axle with an 8.6" last year I used the 4 best arms of the bunch, and none had more than some surface rust on them.
I should have some time tomorrow evening hopefully so I'm going to pull the wheel and check everything else for any damage (such as the lower arm) and also check over the front end for any damage aside from a whacked out alignment. Good thing I have my summer fun car so I can still go to work until I get this thing fixed.
If anyone has an upper trailing arm lying around let me know as I need one. There is a local junk yard that has both a trailing arm and a TCCM (my 02's died recently), their price on the trailing arm is decent enough (50-ish bucks), the TCCM is a little more than one off ebay but if I go there the convenience factor may be worth the extra.
Friday early afternoon I was accelerating and merging onto a highway. Traffic was fairly heavy and the ramp was short, so I wasn't being light with the accelerator. I was focused more on traffic than potholes and, well, one was a doozy. I hit it hard and the end result just about threw me into the semi truck next to me and I had to catch the vehicle. Now I've hit harder bumps before but never really had one throw the vehicle like that. I caught it and realized that going straight the wheel was now cocked to the right, something just felt off in the back end, and when I would hit the gas more than just light-moderate it felt like it wasn't pushing the vehicle straight forward

I got off the highway and pulled into a parking lot to check stuff out. Checked the front first of course and I didn't see anything obviously wrong. Started poking around the rear and found my rear upper passenger trailing arm is snapped off!
View attachment 20803
The rust is just surface rust, the metal is still plenty thick. When I replaced my rear axle with an 8.6" last year I used the 4 best arms of the bunch, and none had more than some surface rust on them.
I should have some time tomorrow evening hopefully so I'm going to pull the wheel and check everything else for any damage (such as the lower arm) and also check over the front end for any damage aside from a whacked out alignment. Good thing I have my summer fun car so I can still go to work until I get this thing fixed.
If anyone has an upper trailing arm lying around let me know as I need one. There is a local junk yard that has both a trailing arm and a TCCM (my 02's died recently), their price on the trailing arm is decent enough (50-ish bucks), the TCCM is a little more than one off ebay but if I go there the convenience factor may be worth the extra.