Just wondering if this has happened to anyone else.

This morning, while taking a sweeping merge from the right, I heard a pop from the left front suspension. I pulled off onto the first possible side street and discovered that I could now move my left front wheel 1-2" back and forth in the wheelwell. Seeing the radius rod move with the wheel and confirming that it wasn't a more serious issue, I gently drove the car back home, took everything apart and discovered this:





There isn't any serious rust damage to the radius rod and the car only has a hair under 99K miles on it, but I don't know how it was driven during the first 77K miles by the previous owner. I installed Moog radius rod bushings 11K miles ago. I wonder if there wasn't some kind of issue with the rod and the combination of the stiffer bushings with less give to them somehow led to this failure. The car was never in an accident and all suspension parts were original when I bought it, so it doesn't look like the suspension ever took a hit hard enough to warrant replacing parts. The only thing that I can think of is that this was the side where that almost new Moog lower ball joint failed in a parking lot and maybe the added stress on the suspension had something to do with this radius rod failure. That was 7K miles ago though. Strange..........

 

Holy crap! Glad it didn't fail at speed!

 

It failed at something like 25-30 MPH. Even if the radius rod lets go, the knuckle is still held in place by the control arms / ball joints and the outer tie rod and that's what prevents the wheel from going all the way back or forward in the wheelwell, but I wouldn't drive like that for many miles. Luckily, I was only about 5 miles from home and made it back without a problem by taking it nice and easy.

I ordered a new radius rod from Tim @ Acura of Peoria and he said that he's never seen one do that.