Hey guys I hit a patch of black ice and skidded off the road while doing 30mph, hit a snow bank almost head-on and now my car's steering wheel is shuddering. There was a curb underneath the snow and when I hit it it was like "BAAMM" so naturally that's what caused the problems. Further complicating things, I had the steering wheel all way turned to the left when I hit the embankment and that may have added undue stress to the impact of the wheels to the curb.

There is no visible damage to the car and the K1's look undamaged on the outside. The problem I now have is that the steering wheel vibrates at even low speeds but it's more pronounced at higher ones (I haven't gone over 40mph with it). Weird thing is, my old '91 Ford Escort had a serious alignment issue and the steering wheel vibrated at 55+mph. Could this hopefully mean my alignment is just totally out-of-whack? Could one of my rims be bent to hell and causing the vibrations due to being unbalanced? Or is this going to require a total overhaul of my front suspension components? For the record, the front passenger side tire hit the curb first and it feels like the vibrations are coming from there.

Of course, all of you will be speculating as to what is wrong but I just want to get an idea of what I've got in-store for me when I take it to the dealership.

Thanks for any help you can provide, and I'm just happy there wasn't another car in front of me when I skidded off the road.

 

check front x-member and make sure it didn`t get pushed back . i hit a couple of parking stops and it pushed the wheels back in the wheel wells knocked it out bad . the x-member is connected via the radius arms and it pushes everything back

 

the best thing to do is to put the car on an alingment rack then you will be able to see if you bent the steering knuckle(as you had the wheel cranked to the left).
You can also have the front wheels balanced to see if they are off.

but you could have damaged a whole whack of things like a bearing,ball joint or the cross member.

I have also seen radius rods snap from these types of curb loving.

 

The alignment should not cause the steering wheel to wobble. Typically this would be caused by a bent rim or something out of balance. One time I slide sideways into the median @ 73mph in a snow storm and I had the same thing happen. There was mud and ice packed on the inside of the rim. I scrapped it off and the problem went away. Good luck

 

Hey guys, thanks for the advice and especially the last guy. I checked my rim and sure enough, the driver's side front rim was chock full of snow and mud, like entirely filled. I scooped it out and, like u said, the problem went away. What hasn't gone away is the alignment which is totally fucked! Hahaha, it's off by at least 8-10 degrees, pulling left. Ah well, I needed an alignment anyways since I never got one after putting the K1's on.

Thanks again for your advice I'm quite relieved it was such an easy fix.

Thx again

 

yep, that's happened to me a million times. used to happen to me hella when i had my suburban with a plow on it, i'd plow someone's lot or driveway, then once i got on the highway, it would wobble bigtime. i'd always just pull over and kick the snow outta the wheels. glad that was the main problem

 

I did literally the exact same thing. Turned out my axel was fucked.

 

you hit a median at 73mph!!!!!! omg! what is a median??? is it some kind of bird or fancy name for curb?? dam i really take good care of my car and i wont ever crash. (actually i will but not today or soon) so why are you guys crashing all of these precious cars that i love!! if you crash your 88-91 civic/crx then that makes one less of them in the world for me and others to drive. dont you guys know that these are like hondas endagerded speices (i used to work at the zoo..thats why i use big fancy words! but i only used to clean up elephant poo but i would talk the talk!!) so quit recking my favorite car!! please i honda

 

i dont think people wreck their crx's on purpose...

 

yeah but you know those hb and 4door guys are crazy!! (wait im a hb guy) jk