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I have a 99 with 133k miles, it was in a accident in the front passenger, don’t know if it’s relevant.
ive been chasing a mystery clunk for a year now and am completely lost.
Went down the rabbit hole of replacing one thing after another and found the clunk was the passenger lower control arm. Now after changing almost everything I have a light clunk on the driver side mostly very seldom on the passenger side. I’ve changed upper and lower control arms, ball joints, strut rods, sway bar links and bushings, power steering rack bushings, new Megan racing coilovers, basically everything except inner and outer rods. I even changed the trailing arm bushings on both ends which was causing a horrible steering issue when braking.
I just replaced the passenger upper control arm a second time due to one of the bushings having play, I noticed even with new bushings on the sway bar I could use a pry bar and slide it back and forth, so I just took off my end links and ran down the road to see if that would stop the sound or swerving, and it didnt. Sometimes when I’m braking the front right will pop a little louder than when running over bumps. The only shop that can get my car on their lift charges 135 for an alignment so I want to track the sound down before I spend that money for the 4th time. The techs claim they checked the car each time like I asked but I still know something is wrong.
I know someone who has an LS430, he went to a chain store tire shop to get 4 new tires, they put all new tires on mounted and balanced, seemed fine, well these lug nuts are not a tapered to fit like traditional lug nuts, they are slotted lug nuts kind of like the old mag wheels, so the rim was off center to one side on one of the front wheels, the guy mistakenly tightened the lug nuts to the outer lip of the rim instead of passing though the center lug bores, felt tight but the lugs did not pass through the bore holes. Well anyways he drove out everything was good for a short time got up to around 50 mph and the rim broke loose and severely damaged his front end and part of the structural unibody areas as well. So the tire shop and the insurance company at the time did not want to total it, they paid like 7 grand to have a body shop fix it.
Well long story short his car was never the same, weird clunking noises all the time, never tracked the same, he took it back to the body shop a couple times and they told him there is nothing they can do. He spent 3 grand on a lawyer to reclaim loses of a still damaged car and he still lost the case.
All over slotted lug nuts that were not mounted right on the rim.
So, that's what comes to mind when I read your post.
I also can agree about the accident potentially causing wonky issues. Do you know the severity of the accident? Do you have any hints or evidence of the damage caused? Or do you only know that carfax reported something.
What about shock mounts and bump stops? I can't remember if those are included in coils or not.