Well I had the Whiteline Alignment Kit installed on my car for about 600 miles. After about 500 miles I started to hear a knocking sound coming from the front suspension especially at slow speed turning and on curbs (driving into a drive way). The knock started to get progressively louder, initially I thought it was the stiffer sways bars. After rechecking every bolt in the front suspension I found the culprit.

The nut that was included for the front tie-rods from Whiteline had failed. Luckly it got jammed on the tie-rod end. In any case if that nut would have totally sheared off at highway speed it could have been a disaster.

I am contacting whiteline regarding this issue I had. The kit was installed by me, however all the nuts were tightened down to factory specs.

Here is the carnage.



Here is how the kit looks, notice it is the same nut as used on the kit.

 

I thought Whiteline product are quality.....?

 

i wouldn't blame functional performance shortfalls on a hardware failure associated to a nut..

i mean. probably could have been a bad production lot of nut, or the nut could have been cross threaded accidentally and torqued to factory specs that ultimately lead to the nut failing..

if the bushings or metal casting had cracked, then might be associated with poor Quality control on the part of the subcontractor hired to make the part.

of all the Whiteline prodcuts i've seen.. they are of high quality.. hope you get this resolved, but in the mean time, trip to home depot?

 

Waiting on my coilovers before I put this kit on... it's sitting on my floor in my room. I'm assuming Whiteline will try to help you in any way possible, but my guess is it's an isolated incident and maybe accidental cross-threading. I've not seen a nut get stripped out like that just from standard usage unless it was cross-threaded, but if that was the case, I'd assume it would have been more difficult to tighten.

 

That's the Roll center correction kit yeah? Looks like the nut was too soft to me, not sure if they normally go through a heat treating process or not but it looks like that one was annealed rather than heat treated for the threads to pull out like that... scary shat that is

 

What is the purpose of this kit?

 

The bushing or nut, it's all part of the kit. Any piece fails, it goes onto them. Hopefully they resolve this for you. I know you could probably goto home depot but you shouldn't have to. Glad you and the car didn't take on damage.

 

got a picture of the rod it was threaded on? also maybe a pic of the bottom of the nut.

 

Damn!!! I didn't even know that was possible. Never seen the thread stripped off a nut that clean !

 

Is this the roll center kit?

 

yes

 

I'll take some pics later today. Of the rod and bottom of nut.

 

UPDATE:

Even though they want to replace the kit, I do not feel like taking off the old one and shipping it to AUS for inspection. I will replace the NUT with a higher grade SS one.

I inspected the ball joints and the tie rods-no play in the tie-rods.

 

For all the hassle, you could possibly help prevent this from happening to someone else by sending it in. I do realize its a pain in the a@%, but I wonder why you even bothered sending them an email in the first place if you were only going to replace the nut with an aftermarket one anyways.

 

To inform that this happened and have better quality control over the contractors and products they use.

It would not be feasible for me to now take time and labor on my part to get and put the parts on and off, pay for international shipping to AUS, have down time for the car for weeks, lose $60 dollars on a front end alignment which is needed after reinstalling the kit. So I would lose more than $170 on this deal with everything included instead of me going paying 44 cents for a grade 8 SS nut. Then after all of this they would tell me the kit is not defective and that the nut failed and it was a isolated case.

Makes no sense to me. Hopefully by me informing the Whiteline, they will use either different nuts or use better quality control.