1994-2002 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
Ugh!!! I hate driving outside of the good ol' State of Maine! My parents (I'm 18, so I live with my parents) just got a '99 9-3, a really beautiful black one. We had only driven it 200 miles when this happened. Tonight, we were driving down in Malden (Right outside of Boston) and hit the biggest pot hole this side of the Grand Canyon. The story goes as follows: My sister and her Fiancé live in Malden, MA. We went down to visit and decided to go out to eat. We decided on the Hill Top Steak House on Rt. 1 in Revere (I think).... My soon to be brother and law insisted that he knew a short-cut, so instead of taking the Fells Parkway (A nice, smooth road through a residential area), we took this horrible road to get onto route 16 (The road, if you know it is... well, the best I can describe it is if you are at the Malden Center T stop, and you get on Pearl street heading towards Boston, away from Rt. 1, and go to the intersection with a stop light and a few gas stations around. At that intersection, you'd go left, then go under the T rail bridge, then take the first right heading towards rt. 16 and Mellon Financial). So now that you locals now the road I'm talking about :-p. We were following my sister and her fiance down this horrible pothole ridden road, he was going fast, and I was trying to keep up, but didn't want to go faster than 30 because of the deteriorated road. So we hit a couple of big holes, nothing major, then I see a small puddle (from all the snow Boston just received). I thought nothing of it, and couldn't avoid it because there was traffic coming the other way. As soon as we entered the puddle (a small puddle maybe 2 feet by 2 feet) BAM!!! I thought the wheel had fallen off, the left side of the car dipped down literally a foot, then Went up into the air (that side left the ground) and came slamming down back on the road. I was traveling at maybe 20-25MPH when this happened. The worst part was the sound the poor car made when it hit the other side of the hole, a hard, harsh metallic sound. After the screams of my mother subsided, I managed to get my wits and noticed the car was pulling to one side, and thudding with some intensity. So we pulled off at the nearest store and got out to look. The front left wheel had been bent into almost a square right where the tire meets the rim. We decided that the tire was still holding air (amazingly) and we limped along to a Pep Boys. At the Pep Boys, a tire mechanic said that the tire wasn't leaking and that we could risk going the 70+ miles to get back to Maine. We ate at the Hill Top (I had a delicious BBQ steak :-p) and started our journey home. We decided against taking I-95 to get back home (a main artery on the east coast) and took the slow (and not so smooth) Route 1. When I had the car going above 35mph, it seemed to pull one way or another pretty bad (sometimes worse than others), and it was vibrating/thumping fairly bad. I can explain the thumping on the bent rim/tire, but the pulling that came from both directions worries me, I think that hole really did a job on the front end/steering/suspension. At certain speeds I almost had to fight the wheel to stay on a straight track, where as before I could almost take my hands of the wheel and it would drive in a perfect straight line. The trip that normally took 1.25-1.5 hours took four and a half :-/.
So I guess my question would be, what should be done about this wheel, can it be straightened?(Its the standard 3 large spoke wheels found on most 98-99-00? 9-3s and 900s) could a bent wheel be blamed for the pulling? I've had experience with a bent wheel before. It was on my old 89 9000T, although it was a rear wheel, so I don't know if it caused steering problems.
posted by 65.162.19...
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