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\nAs I was driving back from Paradiset, the car started making strange noises when I engine braked. In fact it was doing a little bit of it already yesterday afternoon, which was part of my reason for not driving further than I had to.<\/p>\n
\nAs I was driving back from Paradiset, the car started making strange noises when I engine braked. In fact it was doing a little bit of it already yesterday afternoon, which was part of my reason for not driving further than I had to.<\/p>\n
Google told me that thumping noises during engine braking should not be a sign of anything particularly dangerous (might just be the suspension screws of something-or-other needing tightening).<\/p>\n
That’s fine, I don’t need to engine brake, I can drive home without it.<\/p>\n
But what started out as a little bit of thumping during engine braking gradually grew into more thumping also while just driving, especially at higher speeds. I modified my plan from “just drive smoothly and don’t engine brake” to “stay away from highways and get home by smaller roads”.<\/p>\n
Over the next 10 minutes the noises continued to worsen, to the point where it sounded like the car was about to fall apart. I stopped, found the nearest train station, and drove there very, very cautiously. Called Eric, who’s better at diagnosing car noises. He took the train there, took a twenty-second test drive, agreed that the car sounded unsafe to drive any further, and located the source of the noise to the front wheel. (To me it sounded like it was coming from below me, and I had stopped to check for obvious problems underneath the car, but not found anything visibly wrong.)<\/p>\n
At which point I noticed that the driver’s side front wheel was missing two of its five bolts, and the remaining three were looking very, very loose indeed. So my fears of the car falling apart weren’t far off at all. Good thing I stopped when I did.<\/p>\n
Luckily loose bolts are an easy problem to fix. Eric redistributed the bolts we had left and re-tightened all of them, so we could drive home after all, instead of calling for a tow truck.<\/p>\n