Hello, my name is Walter. Over the past few months, I have been working on my car. I never used to think much about my car. I would just jump into it and hit the road. Things were fine at first, but soon I realised that things were starting to go wrong. Strange white smoke started to appear from the exhaust. Sometimes when I changed gear, I could hear a strange noise. Foolishly, I ignored all of this until my car broke down. When I got to the auto repair shop the mechanic repaired my car and then gave it a full service. As he did so, I began my auto servicing education.
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The modern-day automobile is reliable and will certainly provide you with trustworthy everyday transportation, if you look after it properly. It's very weird for any component to fail suddenly, and if you're constantly aware of your car's performance, you can often predict a failure. Therefore, if you've noticed an unusual "clunking" sound when you're driving the car around a corner, what is the car trying to tell you?
What Is the Likely Culprit?
A large number of different parts work together in harmony to ensure that your vehicle can take you from point to point. They're designed to last for a considerable period of time, but some of them experience more wear and tear and may fail sooner than others. The type of noise that you are encountering indicates that you may be having problems with your wheel bearings.
What Do Bearings Do?
These parts are crucial to your vehicle's performance. They act as a "bridge" of sort to allow your vehicle to convert the horsepower created by the engine to energy that actually propels the vehicle forward. In other words, they allow the wheels and tyres to turn, while receiving propulsion via the gearbox and transmission.
The bearings sit in between the wheel hub and the driveshafts and are quite complicated components in and of themselves. Inside the bearings are a multitude of tiny metal balls that exist in a lot of grease. The grease is intended to dissipate heat that builds up from friction.
What Can Go Wrong?
When the bearings start to wear down, small scratches will start to appear on the surface inside. The noise that you hear occurs when the interior part comes into contact with those scratches at higher speed.
Which Bearing Is at Fault?
When your vehicle goes around a corner, the inside wheel covers a shorter distance than the outside wheel, simply because the outer rim has to cover that extra distance. The outer wheel comes under more pressure at this time and you will hear the noise and feel more vibration when its bearing starts to break down.
Therefore, you will know which bearing is on its way out, as it will be the one on the opposite side to the direction that you are turning.
It's always best, however, to replace all the bearings at the same time whenever you encounter a problem like this. They're quite difficult to remove and replace, however, so take them to a mechanic, who will have the specialist tools.
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