How to Diagnose Front and Ball Joints When Hear Wheel Clunking Noise

When your car has some clunking noise when going over bumps , and hear it mostly on the passenger side right front. Here we will show you how to check it out, and find the problem.

Our module car is Nissan, from more cases , please refer to Nissan Repair Projects.

Before we raise the vehicle up, we bounce the vehicle push down on the fender and see if you can duplicate the noise.

After raise up the vehicle what we need to do is take a look under the vehicle. As we know it’s somewhere on the passenger side, we need to look at the spring the coil springs see if anything kooks broken or if anything looks bent, also check the strut and see if anything is leaking.

Next step check the front end and see if anything is loose. Just need to grab the tire at the top and the bottom and shake it, same check method for sides.

After check it everything seems tight from top to bottom side, but we feel play there from left and right sides, even hear it.

What we need to look at is the lower ball joint and see if there’s any play there and also the tire rod ends, include outer tire rod end and inner tire rod ends.

This happens to be a non-load carrying ball joint and what that means is there is no weight of the vehicle on that ball joint when the tires are on the ground, it was a load carrying ball joint you would need to support the lower control arm in order to check it.

There is a couple other things we need to check before concluding that the ball joints the only thing wrong with the vehicle the sway bar link, you can grab the sway and try to shake it up and down see if there’s any play there.

Also check the bushing for the lower control arm, if you see that the bushing is separated or you can take a pry bar and pry in between here.

Anything that’s contacting the frame is going to cause a rattle or some type of noise. Because the noise was on the right side doesn’t mean we shouldn’t check everything out on the left side, sometimes sway bar links could be bad on one side and it sounds like it’s coming from the right side.