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I've never had clunks of any kind....

mustang16 said:

I just had lowering springs (ford performance street 1") along with sway bars and BMR cradle bushing lockout kit installed. Should I give it some time to settle before doing an alignment? How long or I guess more accurately how many miles should I drive before getting it done?
Also, I was told to expect some temporary clunk/noise. On the drive home I honestly felt like parts were falling off my car. Does this go away with some time?

Click to expand...

You are supposed to get the bump stops trimmed to 5/8 of an inch to reduce the noise from the dampers bottoming out ...:shrug:

I never had any clunks with all of my suspension mods in signature. If there is clunking now, I'm not sure why it would go away with time. There are many things that can cause noise with suspension mods, so it could be any of these or something else: sways bars without later locks, bump stops not trimmed, improper torque, not clocking bushings, springs not seated properly...

If the alignment is off significantly, driving for any length of time is just going to wear your tires out. Get it done soon.

There are a couple different takes on whether you should wait or have your alignment done asap. Like Berstuck said, with the car out of alignment, your tires won't wear properly and the more out of alignment, the more pronounced the wear will be.

That said, with the two cars I've lowered, I've waited about 5-7 days to get an alignment and have not suffered any issues with tire wear. During that time, I put less than 500 mi on the cars. My springs did "settle" or lower a bit over a week versus one hour after initial install.

I will add; make sure you clock the bushings before you get an alignment. I was tossing up whether to bother with this as my wheel gaps looked even but very glad I did. The ride is much more compliant and quieter since doing it.

Let us know how it goes. I drove around for about 300kms (190 miles) before aligning. I wouldn't want to go too much longer. That should be plenty of time for things to settle.

Definitely let your suspension settle. If the clicking noises don't go away by the time you're ready for an alignment (I also agree with 300 miles), perhaps call customer service??

When I install springs for people (not that it happens daily) I tell them wait at least 50 miles before getting an alignment and typically say - "just wait a week of normal driving, your tires will survive your usual commute". By the time the car drives out of the garage, you can see it has effectively settled (especially in the front). I've never seen the rear change after the first drive out of the garage.

Clunks can come from a number if situations. After an exhaustive process of elimination and a lot of whining, I finally found a bad toe link in the rear on my car. The Ford dealer said it was fine but if I rotated it by hand it would clunk and shift just a little bit - imagine what the entire weight of the car would do. Got them to replace it - issue gone.

In other situations, people install progressive springs upside-down, they forget to torque their brake calipers down properly, they install the rear brake pads wrong (without the little guide pin centered properly), installing the wrong IRS bushing inserts in the wrong spot (seen this with a couple CB005 installs and one Steeda install), improperly installed or settled upper strut bearing/seat in the front causing the spring to shift instead of rotate, they don't sit the springs perfectly on their rubber isolators in the rear, they think that installing firmer bushings/inserts will yield no NVH in an already noisy drivetrain, so on, so forth. With basically all of my IRS bushings either inserted or replaced, the only clunking I get is from the god awful sloppy drivetrain in the manual cars. This after numerous track days.

Many installation issues could be resolved if companies hired me to write their instructions... but I digress. ;)

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