97 Grand Prix SE with 3.8 NA.
163K miles, all stock
Dirt road...
I bought my '97 Grand Prix with 159K miles, had no problems to date. Paid
$1,400 for it and pretty sure I stole it from the sap who sold it to
me. If I had the money I'd rebuild the engine and trans but I'm in my last
semester of college and cant afford it until summer...
I live on a dirt road, a BAD one. I'm talking about craters, not
potholes. You could fit a fat lady and her whole plus-size wardrobe in
these things... I've only put 4K on this car and i do no more than 15MPH
down the road, no exceptions, but I can hear the struts knocking into the
mounts from the wear and tear.
My '94 Ford Escort would have driven to the moon and back, were it not for
the "punch-through" symptom. Rear left strut came up through the mounting
hardware and took out an Alpine speaker that was right above it. My guru
machinist father and I welded the top of the strut back into the mounting
surface with a solid chunk of steel. The fix lasted 6 months, then the surrounding, rusted out
portions of the mounting surface "unzipped" around our handy work...
Rocking the front end of my Grand Prix up and down by hand, the visible rubber portions of
the mounts are "squishy". My concern is that the struts may punch through
the mounts as they did on my '94 escort, or that the struts themselves may
break from repeated, undamped impacts with the metal parts of what they're
mounted to.
I'm paranoid about the struts punching through the rusted out mounting surface, and my question is: can you replace just the hardware/surface that the top of a strut mounts to?
