Steering Feels Sounds Clunky How to Diagnose the Steering Shaft Joints

Okay, friends, so you're driving in your vehicle and you happen to notice if you turn your wheel just a tiny bit, you get quite the clunk coming from the steering column area.

This noise doesn't only happen when we're driving down the road hitting bumps. This noise happens even when I'm sitting still and I'm just doing this. What I would like to do is take a peek at that front wheel, and see if it turns while I'm making this clunk noise. If there is movement, it's very minimal, and it's definitely not as far as the steering wheel's turning. That tells me that I want to take a look under the hood.

Now, what we're gonna do next is going to be best having two people. We want somebody inside of the cabin, and we want them doing this with the steering wheel, just a tiny bit, so we can hear that clunk noise. Once we hear the clunk, the other person is going to be right out here and we want to take a look right at this steering shaft. Your steering shaft is going to go from at your firewall, down to either your power steering rack, or your power steering box, depending on what type of automobile you have.

On these steering shafts, what you're probably going to notice is joints that look a lot like this. These are called U-joints. They need to be able to pivot in all directions, and of course, as you're going up and down over bumps, or even turning the steering wheel, everything needs to be able to maneuver perfectly. So if the grease is gone or the cups are bad, you're gonna have an issue, and you're probably going to hear a clunking noise.

So, here's a look at a steering shaft. No, this isn't the one for the vehicle, but it is one that I have in my hand so I can show you. This is the U-joint area right here, and of course, this needs to function as I said before. If you can take this piece right here, and this piece right there, and kind of twist, and you feel movement right there, well then that means that this is no good. That means that there's movement inside the cups, and you need to replace it. Typically, you'd replace the whole steering shaft as a unit.

Let's take a look at the one in this vehicle. Okay, so looking at this steering shaft, this one actually has two U-joints on it. It has one up along the top, near the firewall, and then one all the way down at the bottom, where it connects to the power steering. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna have somebody inside of the truck, and they're actually gonna turn the wheel from side to side, and we're just gonna listen to that clunk noise. We want to pay special attention to these two areas. Go ahead and give it a turn. Holy moly.

This one is very bad. You can tell that it's pretty much ready to separate. Obviously, if your steering shaft was to actually separate, that would be very bad while you're driving down the road. That's definitely not something you're gonna want to play with.

In some cases, it might be easier to get a complete picture of the actual steering shaft from underneath the vehicle.

Okay, friends, so just as a quick disclaimer, not every clunk you hear from the front end is going to be coming from your actual steering shaft. There are other things on the front end that could potentially go bad. So of course, you're going to have to do your due maintenance, and make sure you inspect everything thoroughly. With that said, if you happen to find that you do have an issue with one of your U-joints, whether it's popping, or even binding like this one is right here, it should move freely, you'd want to go ahead and replace the steering shaft as an entire unit. Replacing these little U-joints isn't something that people generally do, you just go ahead and replace the unit, like I said. You want to make sure you go by the particular instructions provided by your manufacturer, because if you don't disconnect your battery, or tie off the steering wheel, well, it could potentially damage your air bag system, assuming you have some.

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