Hi All,
I have recently bought my first Skoda Fabia 2 Estate (2008) and all in all it's a great car, since I have had the car the ride has got progressively worse, after getting my friend who's a full time mechanic to look over it the ball joint, track rod end and anti-roll bar link bar all needed replacing, so I decided to do both sides as preventative maintenance. After taking it for alignment at my local garage they notified me that the console bushes where completely shot, these have since been replaced. It has since been fully aligned and now the ride is even worse.
If I am driving down the bumpy main roads of south Manchester the steering wheel generally feels so unstable and will vibrate and shake randomly, and if I hit any sort of pot hole (which there is many) the steering wheel will violently jolt to whichever side the pot hole is, this also applies to any bump or dip in the road, it's gotten so bad that I nearly fully wiped out on the M60 last night because of it. I have today taken it to my local garage to get them to fully inspect on the ramp and they came back with no findings, they said all joints and bushes where good, inner track rod was fine and no signs of any leaks or bad condition on any of the shocks.
I'm at a bit of a loss as how I should progress before I chuck any money at it. It's a general run about car as I'm not in a financial position to buy a newer 5K car for example. When I test drove the car from the used car dealer it drove perfect with no nasty bumps, knocks or rattles. It has a clean MOT history and fairly good service history along with 4 good continental tires.
My first though that maybe the strut mounts up top have gone but as they are not visible from the mount point under the bonnet it's hard to tell. Any help or advice would be much appreciated. It's gotten to a point where I don't even want to drive the car anymore and just want rid unless it can be fixed for good as my previous experience of the 1.9 PD VAG engine has been great, the engine's are bulletproof. The car has 125K miles on it and was 1 owner from new and serviced at a main dealer Skoda garage.
Any help will be much appreciated