I work at a shop and today, one of our newer techs did both outer tie rods, alignment and an upper control arm on a jeep liberty and when he was done the steering wheel would go out of control everytime you hit a pothole. It was so unsafe we tried to give the furious man a ride home. Now, coming from a shop thats notorious for putting the wrong parts on cars and forgetting to bolt things down. What could be the problem? It was a jeep liberty sport, is it possible we got regular liberty parts or are they the same?
I suspect that this thread might be fiction.
unfortunately, its not.
I do general service and don’t know much by the way!
Sport , limited , etc is associated with the accessories package . As long as the correct year model parts were installed it shouldn’t make any difference which package it is as far as the parts you mentioned are concerned . Some Liberty’s were available with a diesel engine & I don’t know if they might use different parts than the gas models .
Isn’t there an experienced tech that can inspect the new tech’s work ?
Very slow saturday night and all the expirenced techs went home early.
sounds like bump steer
Considering everything is apparently fine until you hit that pothole, I’d guess something went wrong during the upper control arm replacement
Was all of the hardware properly torqued . . . ?!
I highly doubt it honestly, I work at a big chain shop that dosn’t train people properly and will hire anyone which is why i’m leaving in a week!
Db took the words right out of my mouth. “Bump steer” is the tem used when movement of the wheel vertically through its dynamic range induces a steering input. It is not an unknown phenomenon when steering and suspension geometries aren’t what they should be.
Your shop is obligated to recheck all the new parts numbers and to have all the work including the alignment checked by an experienced tech. If it were my shop, the newbie would be doing all this under the scrutiny of an experienced tech, not punitively but as a learning experience. The two should probably start by researching “causes of bump steer”, again as a learning experience. It’s a well known and well documented phenomenon. Honestly, I thought of outlining the causes here, but I truly believe the newbie would learn a lot better if he read them himself under the tutelage of an experienced tutor.
Either there are additional worn parts, fasteners were left loose, and/or the alignment wasn’t done correctly.
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