Front wheel play, bearing or control arms

[tivim91]

Hello audizine. I recently had my front left tire get the inside chewed up, very quickly. Upon inspecting the front left wheel jacked up, there is a significant(1") amount of play when I move the wheel left to right. The entire hub and assembly that connects to the arms is moving. No play vertically. It appears that the play is coming from a combination of the lower rear and upper control arms, although they are only 2 years old. Its hard to determine because the ball joints are allowed to move in general, and that is what is moving.
I did some reading and wheel play is typically related to a bad wheel bearing. I have no symptoms of a bad bearing, no noises, wheel spins straight and quiet. Trying to get the best plan of solving this, without ending up with all new arms and bearing. Anyone able to provide input on this issue?

[q20v]

With 1" of play you should be able to isolate the play to either the control arms or bearings fairly easily.
Wheel bearings usually give a warning that they're going by getting noisy. What brand control arms did you recently install? It's not unusual for cheaper brands to fail sooner than expected.

If you really want to diagnose prior to just throwing parts at it, remove the wheel, caliper, rotor, and see if the wheel hub has play side to side (or up and down). But you probably don't need to go this far because it sounds like the control arms are cooked and you should see the play in the ball joints or failed bushings. Obviously check tie rod ends as well.

[tivim91]

I've never dealt with a bad bearing yet, but Im assuming the play would be in the hub itself, not the entire thing if the bearing is failed right?

I put in a really cheap set of no-name control arms, I guess it wouldn't be surprising they are bad already. Tie rod is good also

[james 408]

If there's no vertical play, you all but rule out wheel bearing. Horizontal play only, your first suspect tie rods. I don't know what movement you're seeing, so I can't tell you, but these joints aren't just flopping around willy nilly unless they're blatantly bad. The play would be independent of steering wheel movement (obviously it's designed to turn so you're looking for unintended deflection with the primary suspect being the tie rods, watch the joints and it shouldn't be that hard to spot it). Specifically, you're looking at the inner and outer ball joints. If you can't isolate anything there, continue your search using a pry bar on all the joints til you find the culprit(s).

This is all assuming your problem isn't just an alignment issue to begin with :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M2D_XtuXZQ

search around and you should be able to find everything you need on youtube.

The typical failure you're looking for is excessive play, not that it's moving, but actual play in the joint itself. You're typicall looking at a ball inside a sleeve (heim joint). So it's literally play between the inner ball which is connected to the shaft of the part playing relative to the housing it sits in. The wheel bearing itself is the same phenomenon. It's just a matter of spotting which joint(s) are the culprits.

This same thing happens on racing heim joints. People are told that it eliminates deflection, well maybe, but in reality after 2-10k miles you have just as much play if not more in your racing heim joint as you did in the stock one. I've seen brand new racing rod ends that are worse than stock joints.