noise."Mechanic: 2007 Dodge Caravan · 1:32am Jun 12th, 2023
Got a little bit of a different one for y'all today—instead of being a diagnostic adventure, it's a repair adventure! But first, you know what to do:
The vehicle in question is a 2007 Dodge Caravan with a Flex Fuel 3.3L, your basic Dodge minivan. The first time it came into the shop was in late April. Routine work; it needed its snow tires swapped off, and its summer tires put on. For those of you who don't live in the frozen north, snow tires have special tread and rubber compounds which make them more flexible and grippy on cold pavement, snow, and slush; and marginally better traction on ice. Many of them also have holes so they can be studded (like cleats for athletes or caulks for horseshoes) although many jurisdictions prohibit studded tires for on-road use.
If you're on the fence regarding snow tires, I can tell you that they do work as advertised: I've used 'em for years, powering through winter snows and unshoveled driveways with exclusively 2wd vehicles (both front- and rear-wheel drive). I can also tell you that if they're unstudded, they won't save you on black ice.
Two of the summer tires were good, but the other two weren't that great. The tread wasn't quite at the minimum depth yet, but they were getting low and might be chancy in the rain. Being the prudent mechanic I am, I put the low tires on the front—you always want the tires with the worst tread on the front of the vehicle, regardless of which wheels are powered. DOT regulations for commercial vehicles say otherwise, but AFAIK those regulations are outdated.*
We don't stock tires, but we can order them, and a new pair of tires was ordered. While they arrived the next day, due to various scheduling issues it was a week before the van could come back in.
When I'd swapped the tires, I'd also noticed that the coolant tube that goes from the water pump to the lower radiator hose was rusty (I can't remember what Chrysler specifically calls this pipe; I think it's the water inlet pipe). Them rusting out is a super common failure, so common that aftermarket suppliers make this pipe.
[Protip: if the aftermarket makes a part which seems like it would be dealer-only, that's a high failure item. I can't get a Ford fuel cooling module from anybody but Ford (AFAIK), whereas Dorman makes one for GM. The good news on the GM trucks is that by the time they're in need of replacement, you don't have to mess with the quick-connects to get them loose—they'll just break off with almost no effort.]
The serpentine belt's also getting worn out. It's not the original but it's probably only been replaced once in the van's life, and with 180,000 miles (290,000 km) it wouldn't be a bad idea to replace the tensioner as well.
It gets the tires first since the customer's got a limited time window to work with. The other repairs will have to wait . . .
. . . but not too long. A week or so later, it's back for the belt, tensioner, and water pipe. Also the front brakes, which were kinda thin. Maybe good for a month or so of normal driving, but this thing's about to head East, through the mountains in Pennsylvania and Maryland, all the way to the Atlantic coast. Mountain roads are not the place where one wants to discover that the brakes weren't as good as they should have been. C.W. McCall sang a song about that, and the truck involved wound up bashed into a feed store in downtown Pagosa Springs.
Also, now that I think about it, Harry Chapin also wrote a song about a truck losing its brakes on the hills in Pennsylvania; that one wound up sliding down a hill in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
There was a feed store at the bottom of Wolf Creek Pass, and a truck containing 30,000 pounds of bananas really did crash in Scranton, PA.
This is where things started to go south. Where the whole program went off the rails. Everything but the brakes went smoothly, and the brakes would have too (spoiler, no they wouldn't), except that the wrong pads got ordered. Instead of front pads, rear pads were ordered. I didn't realize until after I'd already taken apart the left front brake and then went to install the pads and they looked a lot different than the ones that came off. 
I was working late, and by the time I made that discovery, the parts store was closed; no more pads would be forthcoming. What was even worse was it was a Friday, and the customer needed the van first thing Saturday morning , so it went back together with the old brakes (they still had some life left in them. . . )
Hey, a picture of the actual brake pad!
and on Monday it would be round 2 with the front brakes. This time with the correct brake pads.
Monday came, the correct brake pads arrived, and putting them on was straightforward except that the right front caliper was questionable. The dust boot was torn—while that's not an immediate problem, the boot keeps dirt and debris from getting between the caliper body and the piston, which could damage the seal (and cause a brake fluid leak) or could cause the piston to stick in the applied position. Can't get a new caliper right away, the customer needs the vehicle back because his other truck isn't really drivable because it has a stuck right front caliper. Seriously, I can't make this stuff up.
The piston did retract, but it didn't feel great. Still, a test drive was promising; the brakes were working well and not sticking.
And that was it for time, 'cause the customer was leaving for a convention right after work in two days. I might not have mentioned earlier that this is my van. Also I was the one who ordered brake pads for the wrong end of my van, which I figure earns my manager at least one free pass from me when he orders wrong parts for something I'm working on.
Since I thought there was a non-zero chance that the caliper would lock up at some point in the near future—and it needs it anyway—I ordered one and packed it with everything else I was taking to Seaquestriafest. I forgot to pack a good jack and actually thought about that as I was leaving town; I didn't turn around and pick it up mostly because I couldn't remember where I was keeping it. The van came with a jack anyway, and I know where it is. Unlike my shovel 
Less than an hour into my twelve-hour journey, my right front brake decided that it wanted to stay applied forever. Burning brake pads smell kind of like burning socks but more acrid; it's one of those things that you will always recognize once you're smelt it once.
This was further confirmed the next time I came to a complete stop, and I was rewarded with a cloud of smoke wafting from the right front corner of the van. Although it was unnecessary, I got out of the van and did the old back-of-hand test for heat—that brake was hot.
I limped it to an Autozone, bought a proper jack, a new set of brake pads (since the old ones were surely burned up) and set to work swapping out my front caliper. That went surprisingly smoothly (as well it should have; both the wheel and the caliper had been off two days before), and the rest of the journey to Seaquestriafest was entirely uneventful, which I realize is kinda anticlimatic but don't worry, there was the trip back!
Before we get into that, let me offer you a soothing picture of the beach:
One of the other things I'd noticed before departing for the coast was a very faint, very subtle wheel bearing noise. Or maybe it was a tire noise; the front tires weren't great and maybe that was what I was hearing?
But the new tires didn't fix it. And in the multitude of times the van was in the shop, I couldn't pin it down. There was some noise from the right rear, which might have just been normal brake noise. I couldn't feel any bearing roughness in the springs**, and none of the usual tests were useful.
It was quiet, and it could probably handle 1400 miles (2300km) of road trip before going bad, right? And if not, I have AAA, and I even know their number.
Somewhere around northern Maryland I started to hear it all the time. It was still quiet, but also worrisome since I had something like nine hours of driving yet to go. Nine hours of driving with hills and lots of turns, and did I mention that the brakes are attached to the wheel bearings and once things start to get floppy not only do you have a very limited amount of time left to drive, but you also have less-effective brakes. Not ideal in the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania.
By the time I was nearing the Ohio border it had become a constant howl. I breathed a sigh of relief that Pennsylvania was behind me and also a groan of despair 'cause I was in Ohio.
However, I didn't really hear it anymore, and as I pulled into the first oasis off the Ohio Turnpike, I started to wonder if maybe it was the roads in Pennsylvania that were causing the noise. Sometimes roads will do that, they'll interact with something on the vehicle to cause a weird noise or vibration or whatever: years ago when I was daily-driving a 1988 diesel Suburban, I was headed into Lansing on I-96, and right when I hit the freshly grooved pavement, the rear got really squirrely, enough so that I thought I might have a tire going flat or something in the rear end had broken. Turns out it was just a bad combo of the tires I had and the grooves, since the problem only existed on that particular stretch of highway.
Even more years ago, there was a section of I-94 west of Lansing where the wrecker I drove would do a constant pitching motion over the expansion joints unless I was towing something.
Back to the main focus of the blog, though; it turns out that my brain had just tuned out the noise 'cause it had been constant for so long. As soon as I left the oasis and picked up speed, it was back again, and louder than ever.
I did make it all the way home, and I guess I was still numbed to it, 'cause when I drove to work the next morning it was really loud. Would have taken my truck, but it's got a dragging right front brake that gets pretty smoky by the time I get to work. That's next on my list to fix; I might get to that at the end of this week.
By now I was reasonably confident that it was the right front wheel bearing, and I reasoned that an overheating brake hadn't helped it. Even without that, it was failing before I left, and I put 1400 miles on it . . . no reason to be mad about that!
So on Friday after work, I pulled the van into the shop for the fourth or fifth time this May and lifted up the front end and spun the wheels with my hand on the spring, and the right front wheel bearing wasn't bad after all.
The left front was, though. And it was also loose.
The four bolts that retain it came out easily which lulled me into a false sense of confidence. Y'all might know about dissimilar metal corrosion; when you have a steel part bolted to an aluminum part (let's say) and you add in a little salt water, you're going to set up a cool electrolysis experiment which in the case of Oldsmobiles made their rear bumpers fall off, Fords had their fuel pump driver modules corrode through, and practically every modern car has their wheel bearings firmly attached to the knuckles by a thick layer of nearly indestructible aluminum corrosion.
We've got several tools at the shop to help with that. Our latest acquisition, discovered by my manager on a TikTok video and identified by me with some good Google-fu clamps to the wheel studs and uses a jackscrew on the knuckle to force the wheel bearing out. I've used it on two cars with good success so far, and it also sort of worked on my van. It got the process started, and then more than a few minutes with an air hammer got the wheel bearing out. In case that sounds like something you'd want to buy, it's a Lisle 40100 Hub Remover.
Once everything was cleaned up, the new one went right in, and as our repair instructions often helpfully note, "reassembly is the reverse of disassembly."
Source
One of my favorite background ponies is in this picture!
Driving home in near-silence was nice. No wheel bearing noise . . . just that pesky exhaust leak from a hole in the muffler I really don't want to fix just yet.
So what did we learn? A couple of things. First, plan better. An older van is bound to have issues, some of which could have been foreseen. I'd already had to replace the rear brake calipers after one locked up, and I could have ordered new front calipers when I went to do the brakes; if I didn't need them, I could have sent them back.
I should have paid more attention when ordering parts. There's even a picture of the part you're ordering, and while I don't always know what the brake pads on a given vehicle look like if I haven't taken the wheels off yet, I do know what the brake pads on my van look like, and the front and rear are very different in appearance. Also, of course, the catalog says 'front' and 'rear' which is also a good clue.
And lastly, if you've got a vehicle and you can't figure out which wheel bearing is making noise, just take it on a 1400 mile test drive and it'll be obvious by the end of it 
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*the other possibility is that the DOT has figured if you're running very low tread, it's better if you kill yourself rather than other motorists.
**Since vibrations travel well through metal, a lot of times you can 'feel' a bad wheel bearing by gripping the spring and spinning the wheel.
What a plot twist halfway through!
Glad you made it back safe but sorry you had so many problems.
I inherited a very useful/annoying trait from my Dad: despite not being as mechanically skilled as him, I quickly pick up on new/changed noises, and they drive me crazy until I identify them. Depending on the cause, I can either file it under "don't worry" or it gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies until I fix it.
I say this because wheel noises drive me absolutely bonkers, and I've had to drive a fair distance on a bad bearing in an emergency before (Do Not Want!), so I know exactly what that was like. Except I can't tune it out. It drove me batty the whole way.
Wait a sec. It's June and you're just taking snow tires off? Yuch.
I remember when my Taurus blew a gasket and froze the engine. (censored engineers and their rusty heater cores) My friend needed new tires on his Taurus, so we drove it over to the mechanic and spent some quality jack and wrench time before sending the corpse to the scrapyard. Then my friend went to drive away and... Well, *that* model of Taurus used a different size wheel well than *my* model and his new tires would not turn. Yep, stuck cold. Had to undo the whole process.
I'm Canadian and it's only recently I've learned that all Americans hate Ohio, including the people who live in Ohio. Is this something you learn or is it instinct?
The joys of owning an older car. I almost got to ask but what is the lowest mileage vehicle you have ever purchased? You sound like the type of a person who sees 100,000 miles as just getting broken in.
The pickup truck reminded me of a pickup truck that Travis McGee had made from a wrecked & rebuilt 1936 Rolls Royce that he named Miss Agness (after his 3rd grade teacher whose hair was "the same shade of electric blue.").
About 1970 he had to rebuild it after almost hitting a girl & winding up upside down in 10' of water in a drainage canal.
He regretted doing it but the acceleration & brakes were "hopelessly inadequate for modern highway driving".
For comparison, the first Indianapolis 500 was won with a speed of 74.59 MPH (1911).
HA! I was going to say you should be VERY familiar with that vehicle since you have one that's around that year, turns out it's the SAME year... for obvious reasons.
What convention did you go to? And did you bring your travelling pony?
I tended to do the slalom test. The bad bearing will usually make more noise when it's subjected to the increased stresses of being on the outside of a sudden turn. That and a Loooong screwdriver touching the bearing housing with the metal end and the handle amplifying the noises right in your ear tells you a lot about any particular bearing's state of health. Ya kinda need the entire vehicle up on a lift to do that though.
The adventure of Seaquestriafest started the moment you left and did not finish until you got back home.
I had a falling out with my musician mechanic uncle because he didnt believe me that bearing wear could be heard sitting in the vehicle at various speeds and stresses,a nd he despises liars.
This one?
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Slice of Life
Pony tourists invade Baltimore Inner Harbor Hyatt Regency for a convention.Well, they're not wrong.
Assuming you reach the end...
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It's a learned instinct. Case in point. I forgot how much I hate driving in Ohio, but was reminded yesterday going through it.
As a Finn, I heartily support studded winter tires, if you drive anywhere where the roads might get icey. ❄❄❄
And yes, definitely always put the better tires on the rear axle. That helps keep you from fishtailing into oblivion!
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I know, right?
It went better than some trips, but I certainly could have done without those issues. Ah well, the good news is the van's fixed now (except for the exhaust) and should give me some more trouble-free miles before something else breaks.
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I tend to pick up on new noises my own vehicles make, but I'm not always so good with customer's cars, since I don't know what noises they usually make (nor which ones are important). Even worse if the customer's vague about it.
Maybe it's not always the best to be able to tune out noises as I get used to them, but I live close to a state highway and would have trouble sleeping if I couldn't tune out most traffic noise, for example.
Driving on a bad wheel bearing isn't great, especially because you never know when it's going to go from just loud to really bad . . . and it doesn't take long when it starts to go really bad, and then the real expensive failures start.
(Years ago, had a customer that did $1700 in damage to his Explorer by driving with a bad front wheel bearing until it failed completely. One of the things it took out was the aluminum rim.
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Nah, it wasn't that late; I took the snow tires off in late April, and then could basically work on the van once a week until it was done. If I were to put dates on the events in the blog, it started in late April and finished the Friday before Memorial Day. And then a couple weeks before the blog was posted.
A lot of these blogs get written some time before they actually get posted; I think there's one still in the hopper that begins with "Just recently, I was working on..." and the 'just recently' is sometime last year.
I've seen people put wrong wheels/tires on a car and have them hit suspension components. Pays to test-fit that stuff when you can.
I got snow tire rims for my Grand Marquis, used at the junkyard. Two of them would only fit the rear (wouldn't clear the front brakes). Two of them also fit my minivan, sort of (backspacing is wrong, but they don't hit anything).
It's about time to upgrade to a new minivan, and one thing I'd like to know is if the rims/snow tires I have will fit whatever I get next, or if I'll have to invest in a new set. Be a shame if I did, I've gotten lucky/picked carefully when I bought vehicles, and all but of one of my winter cars since 2008 could wear the same size tire. Those snow tires have been on a 1992 Astro; 1997 Grand Marquis; and 2001, 2002, 2007 Dodge Caravan. They'd fit my S10, but since it doesn't run, snow tires wouldn't be much use.
5732927
I want to know how a bad exhaust manifold could cause a coolant leak. Not saying it couldn't happen, but I can't think of a situation where it would.
Ah the 2007 Dodge Caravan, it always seems to be so popular with mechanics haha.
5732932
It's instinct. I can say that we Michiganders at least have a reason for the grudge; we went to war with them and Congress intervened and gave Ohio Toledo. That's why the bottom border of Michigan has a jog in it.
(To be fair, we got the whole Upper Peninsula out of the deal, so it worked out okay in the end.)
Supposedly, more astronauts have come from Ohio than any other state; some suspect that's because they want to get as far away from Ohio as possible.
5732933
Well, a lot of the cars I've owned have been old enough they only have five-digit odometers, so it's impossible to know for sure. Based on wear, for example, it's plausible that my Suburban only has 80,000 miles on it.
The lowest mileage that I know for sure is about 120,000 miles; both my current minivan and my S-10 had that on the odometer when I bought them.
The known highest-mileage vehicle that I've bought is my Dodge Ram (the one with the locked-up right front brake); it had over 380,000 miles on it when I bought it. I also have a retired delivery step van which only has a five-digit odometer, and I have no ideas how many times it rolled over.
5732934
You can turn almost anything into a pickup truck with just a Sawz-All.
Especially back in the day, when most things had frames.
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Even if it hadn't been mine, you're right that I'm very familiar with them. Not only 'cause I've owned three (so far), but because it's also been a common vehicle we work on for the past decade or more.
Amusingly enough, there are a fair number of vehicles I don't want to buy because I'm very familiar with them
Seaquestriafest in Ocean City, MD. And yes, I did bring a travelling pony--several of them, in fact. One of the better pictures that came from the trip is Derpy on my dash:
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/879533986303606834/1117975858502701127/20230522_220453.jpg
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Both are good tests,; unfortunately neither of them produced results before I left for my trip. Not ones where it was clear enough to call which bearing it was, anyway. Based on the trip, it was six or seven hundred miles away of being easily identified,
5732958
That is true. Not uncommon with road trips, to be honest.
Ciderfest was an adventure but for a different reason; sooner or later I'll be posting a blog about part of that trip.
5732966
That's silly, there are all sorts of vehicle noises you can hear, and what they sound like changes based on speed or load.
5732978
Not that one (although for reasons that haven't come up in the story yet, it's kinda adjacent). A few hours further east, about as far east as you can go in Maryland without falling in the ocean. [The route I took put me within 850 feet (258 meters) of the easternmost point of Maryland.]
They're not, but it's always frustrating to have to read the instructions in reverse.
Either it's really noisy and obvious by the time the trip is over, or the wheel falls off and the trip is over . . . either way, you know which bearing it is
I'll be honest, I did breathe a sigh of relief when I was within 100 miles of home, 'cause that's how far AAA will tow me without charging me extra money.
5733042
As far as I know, they're illegal for on-road use in Michigan, but I've been in a few situations where they would have been very helpful. Even without studs, snow tires are way way better in the winter than all-season tires.
A lot of people don't know that. Including my manager (and I've tried to explain it to him, but he doesn't like to listen to stuff that's different than what he thinks, sigh).
Same goes for questionable tires--a blowout on the front axle is easier to deal with than one on the rear, especially in a SUV or van. When I had two really questionable tires on my Suburban and two good ones, the good ones went on the rear. Couple days later, I did have a blowout, and it wasn't that bad to control.
5733099
I could write a whole blog about why minivans are cool.
BLOG
(don't mind all the broken image links, maybe one day I'll fix them)
EDIT: apparently today was the day
Decently reliable, easy to work on, parts are easy to get, and I can carry lots of stuff or lots of people. It handles like a car and hauls like a mini-truck, and it's big enough for me to camp in the back--which I've done, many times.
Even better, this one has Stow-N-Go, but since it's (probably) a retired rental van, the middle seat doesn't stow in the floor but it still has the floor pockets for it . . . so if I take the seat out of the van, I have lots of storage space and a basement in my van.
5733096 My friends in North Dakota say that Summer is the best week of the year.
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Lol I feel that. Right here it's maybe summer or maybe not, depends on the day. Right now it's dropped back to more spring-like.
Take the train.
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Trains sometimes break, too.
The good news is that the engineer found a shortcut in North Dakota and made up an hour on the schedule.
That's one of the Big Lies, right up there with "The cheque is in the mail", "Of course I'll respect you in the morning", and "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."
Installation is never the reverse of removal.
5733493
This is true. Like, I can't unhit the new wheel bearing with an air hammer.
I suppose that's still a more useful instruction than one I came across for putting an alternator in an Intrigue:
1. disconnect battery.
2. remove all necessary components.
3. remove alternator.