Okay, this has me a little concerned. I'm heading out on a 2 week roadtrip this Sunday (including a visit to the Dragon), but while driving the car this afternoon, I started noticing an occasional pop or thunk from the rear of the car.

It's not cyclical or rhythmic, and there's no grinding sounds. It's not the famous one time "axle pop". Had that, fixed it long ago.

It gererally seems to coincide with bumps in the road, but it's not entirely predictable. Some large bumps don't make a sound, while some small bumps do. Seems to happen more often on surface streets than at highway speeds. It also seems to do it sometimes when you first hit the brakes. I also heard it a few times driving slowly around my cul-de-sac.

Car is an '02 with ~31k miles. I installed Bilstein PSS9s back in March, and the car has been driven ~2500 miles since. I put new pads and rotors on at the same time. The LR disc was showing a developing ridge, so I took off its pads to inspect, and put them back about a week ago. I just double checked, and the lug nuts are tight.

I'm definitely going to pull off the wheels, re-set the LR pads. While I have the wheels off, I'll check for any loose supsension bolts. Any other ideas? I'm thinking brake or suspension, if it were the diff going, it would probably be a more consistent grind, right?

I welcome any and all suggestions for things to check. Help!!

 

What stiffness do you have your PSS9s set at? When you installed them did you compress the suspension when you torqued the bolts down? How much lower did you drop the car?

 

I keep the pss9s on the softest setting for street driving. All bolts were torqued with the suspension fully compressed. Very mild lowering, not quite 1" lower than stock.

 

Found and fixed....loose sway bar end link. 100% my fault. I loosened one of them when I was doing the rear suspension, then decided I didn't really want to deal with the pain of disconnecting/reconnecting the sway bar. Apparently I didn't torque it back down fully and it finally backed off a little. Murphy's law said it had to be today...then again, I suppose it's better now than during a 3k mile road trip.

Fixed that, topped up the oil, she's good to go!

 

Glad you figured it out - have fun at the Dragon Jeff!