Amazing what happen to equipment when it gets loaned out?. About 30 years ago I used sears and sawbuck cheap radial arm saw, this was after the day before I helped the guy finish off shed/pole barn style work shop. he was cutting ruff cut 4 by 4 oaks. the next day I was cutting 1/4" plywood the saw quite on the 3rd cut. But, beings I was using it at the time I called sear repair man out. $139 bucks later on a 350 dollar saw. I learned a good lesson that day? Don't borrow equipment. Knowing the day before probably what burnt the saw out. but I still didn't want that on me. JD usually engineers there equipment pretty good, I know my LX system is rock solid with 350 hours on it, but it's not as heavy as you X500. I would say it wasn't normal for the steering to wear out that quickly. Replacement parts are probably going to be pretty high, hopfully you won't have to do it again. But, as rusti suggested some anual pre-ventive greasing sure wouldn't hurt IMO.

In the 10 years, I've had 5 different cars to maintain. Pretty sure I did not put struts on the Maxima in that time. So much info. getting pumped into our brains these days, I can only hold so much in my 16K capacity brain! Information overload. Anyway, seems to be riding and handling adequately, just a little stiff on bumps. Also, seems to be working itself looser as time goes on. Too many other places to spend my limited funds on at this time. Thanks for your input.

Last year my daughter was driving a 2012 Nissan Pathfinder, transporting her 2 children ages 1 and 3. This was the only vehicle that she owned and drove it for almost 2 years before the incident happened. My daughter totally lost all control of her steering after taking a left from a stop sign on to a main Hwy. She was almost involved in a serious if not fatal collision. Her husband had it towed to the dealership where they could find nothing wrong. They tried re-enacting what happened but still said they found nothing. My daughter refused to set foot in the vehicle with her children and got rid of it. This brings me to this web site today. Last night My mother was driving her 2009 Dodge Caliber to my house to visit me. She had bought the car new off of the lot and had been driving it since. She was waiting at a red light when she noticed an emergency vehicle approaching. Her light turned green and she waited to let the emergency vehicle pass. She said that she tried to give the car gas but it wouldn't move at first. She said that when it finally moved it acted like it wanted to fishtail but yet she hadn't given it too much gas. She was turning left at a major intersection and said the car was uncontrollably steering all over the road. She said it didn't matter which way she turned the wheel it went where it wanted to go. She described it as driving on ice. My mom made it to the median, turned the car off, with hazards on, trying to catch her breath. She was almost at the turn to my neighborhood so she decided to go very slow. She said that it could have been really bad. I believe that something serious is being missed mechanically. The reason that I'm searching for answers now is because it happened to 2 of my family members at different times and in different vehicles. How many more has this happened to or will this happen to? If anyone out there has any information that would help me find out what's causing this please let me know. Thanks

"Self centering" is not a function of the rack and pinion, but is determined by the geometry of the pivot points of the wheel and location of the tire's contact patch with respect to this geometry. It is a rather messy problem of descriptive geometry to compute or solve graphically, but there is a simple test one can do to check 'centering'. (This test works for bicycles and motorcycles also. First, try it on a bicycle to see the effect since this is very easy to do.) When the wheel is turned to left or right from center, the car may rise or fall a small amount. If there is no change in elevation, the setup is neutral and has no prefential state. If the car has it lowest elevation with the wheels straight forward and it rises a bit when the wheels are turned either left or right, it has positive centering. In this case, the preferential state is for the car to seek its lowest elevation and that corresponds to "wheels straight ahead". If, on the other hand, the car reduces in elevation when turning it either left or right, it has negative centering and will be a bearcat to keep it tracking straight. Its preferential state is to turn. You can not let go of the steering wheel. If you do, it will turn. This is a bad situation. The steering geometry can be correct and yet the car may tend to wander requring constant correction. This can be caused by differences in sideways stiffness of the tire between the front and back set. Once I had a car that was fine for tracking, but when snow tires were put on the rear, it required constant correction to keep it on the road. Through experimenting with various tire combinations, this problem was pinned to differences in sideways stiffness between the front and rear tires. The snow tires with blocky treads plus diffeences in sidewall stiffness were 'walking' sideways. There is yet another factor for tracking on center while at speed, and that is differences in the sideway stiffness of the suspension system between front and rear. Tire sideway flexibility is part of this system. An auto when cruising down the road at speed also responds to side forces notable caused by air (wind) pressure. When a car recieves a blast of wind from its side, it may make a self correction if the rear end of the car moves sideways a bit more than its front. Moving the tail end over tends to point the front wheels toward the blast. If this is overdone, oscillation and difficulty in control can happen. These are some of the factors that affect tracking straight. Since your vehicle is a street rod, likely, its steering geometry was not 'enginnered' and contains a design fault. Its camber and caster may be suspect. Also, the location of the tire's contact patch with relation to the pivot axis is critical.