Cracked rear shock towers
 

This is a nightmare situation.

Steve’s rear shock mounts arrived. I removed my rear shocks and got around to swapping the foam isolators for the poly isolators.

When I was ready to put everything back in place I encountered an Eldritch nightmare. The metal around some of the studs fatigued and cracked.

I was able to find a welder that can come to my house to cut and weld in a new patch and reinforce it.

With the rest shocks removed, would that be enough space for him to work with or should I remove the entire IRS? To make matters worse, it happened on both sides.

The degrading foam mounts may have actually saved my life. To keep on driving like that would have been very dangerous indeed

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...b8b7bb588.jpeg
Yes, I’m concerned about that fuel line. I told him about it.


https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...5bda3f7c9.jpeg
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...f9b6f183b.jpeg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...c90bab741.jpeg
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...ccd22d4b6.jpeg


This could possibly be the rear suspension creaking I haven’t been able to locate for the past 4 years.

Ouch - that sucks!! Hopefully he can fix it for you

Good catch and looks like just in time.
A good welder will have the right gun to get in there. I do worry about the thin edges blowing away when he starts.
You might want to make some plates with holes in them to stick at the back of every one of them, properly have to make each one for position, bummer.

Yeah, he said he can reinforce it. I very much want that. It will be riding on poly rear mounts now. I expect them to be even harder on the metal.

Has anyone else had this happen to them?

I would never have expected this to happen. Perhaps that confirms just how bad your road conditions are....

ouch, I'll be checking that area on mine!
WJ

Yuck. It looks like this cable:

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...d6b225b2c4.png


and also this one:

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.jag...6e632be8b7.png

got trapped between the body and the upper spring mounting at some point. This would definitely put extra stress on the studs.

Do the innermost pairs of studs show similar cracking at their bases?

As cjd says, good catch.

Good eye! That's one possibility for sure. He came in and welded it today. I finished putting everything back together a few hours later and I just came back from a test drive. Between Baxtor's rear mounts and his welds, all the noises of my rear suspension have been resolved. In fact, there are no noises that can be felt inside the cabin at all. It's eerie.

The rear end is also sitting quite a bit higher now. At least 2 inches higher. My old mounts had withered down into almost nothingness. The car feels tighter than ever.

Mayhaps
The man who came over to weld it said it's actually a very common thing to happen here in PR. He's fixed many cars with cracked shock towers, but they are usually front shock towers on front wheel drive cars. He said that often times a bad shock absorber that was driven on too long plus our crappy roads are at fault.

The guy who came over to my house to fix this did a good job and I think he could've charged quite a bit more. He asked $125. I think that's a pretty good deal.

What a deal and to solve the problem that quick.
Well done.

Yep, a great deal indeed. Happy motoring....

You have it repaired and on the road in less time than it took me to crawl under my car and confirm that mine are NOT cracked.
Enjoy the ride!
WJ

glad to hear you have her back on the road and

I'm not out of the woods yet. The car was fine yesterday. Today it doesn't want to back out of my garage.

I just lifted it up to check. There is nothing binding in the suspension. When I try to back out the car, it moves about a foot and then abruptly stops. Yet, when in neutral I can push it out without an issue. When I lifted the car, I spun the wheels by hand and noticed no issue. I raised each side to check for binding and found none. Then when I put started the car while on jackstands and put it in reverse, I noticed the driver's side rear wheel was spinning much much faster than the passenger side rear wheel which was at a constant velocity and much slower, in fact, at times it seemed to stop. But then, when I hit the brake pedal, the driver's side wheel would stop abruptly and made a bang from the brake immediately stopping the rotor (likely because it was spinning much faster). After that, if I tried pressing the throttle again, it would act like if I were standing on the brake pedal, and after a bit more throttle it would begin spinning.

When I put the car in drive, again the driver wheel is spinning much faster than the passenger wheel. In fact, the passenger wheel stopped while the driver wheel keeps going, however in drive it doesn't prevent motion as it does in reverse.

This issue didn't show up yesterday when I drove the car. There are no codes or warning lights showing up on the dash.

What should I be looking at? Brakes? Wheelspeed sensor?

Could it be the handbrake mechanism come loose and binding up when you reverse?

You mean the braided steel Y cable just aft of the drive shaft right before the differential that then travels to each rear brake? Or do you mean something inside the brake handbrake brake drum and shoe setup?

I'll check. I think the symptoms do seem consistent with either the handbrake being stuck on one side, a sticking caliper, a collapsed brake hose (mine are stainless steel) or some weird traction/abs issue (but no codes tho???).

The bigger issue is that it's blocking my Mini, so I'm currently stuck in my house. If I had to go out for some reason I'd have to put the car in neutral and push it out onto the street in order to be able to take the Mini out. This is so damn inconvenient.

I was thinking about something in the hub.

Ok, I'll check to see what I can find.

I found the problem. Both of the driver’s side rear caliper bolts were loose. The bottom one had backed out 90% of the way. Thus, when reversing, the caliper was binding on the rotor. I removed the bolts and inspected them.

I found they had antiseize in the threads. Past me in my distraction must have grabbed the anti-seize instead of the blue thread locker when I replaced my rotors.

I then inspected the passenger side caliper bolts. Those DID have blue thread locker on them and were tight.

I’m feeling lucky to be alive right now.

The good news is that you will never make that mistake again....

glad you were able to find/fix the brake issue