Postby ShipFixer » Thu Jun 25, 2020 9:18 am
The only bushings in the front struts are in the bottom of the strut/shock tower itself. The other end, the "strut mount," is a metal and rubber (or polyurethane, if you went that way like I did) sandwich at the top of the arch above the wheel well. That part won't make noise. The bushing in the strut "could" make noises like this because it is a simple bushing and its motion correlates to it. But it rarely is. It is constantly rotating when the car is in motion, unlikely to seize, and constantly self-polishing. Also, if you look at it, there is a lot of space between the metal outer bushing shell in the strut and the LCA, so the odds of something getting trapped in there or a secondary noise source is limited. It's also the only thing that is normally replaced or disassembled in the whole suspension assembly.
Stuff that is correlated to strut movement and "sounds like a bad strut" includes but is not limited to LCA bushings, UCA bushings, sway bar bushings, sway bar links, and the most common (at least on the forums)...the front two body mounts. The second most seems to be the sway bar bushings, where a really old bushing may allow some contact between the bar and the vehicle, aside from allowing rotation through the rubber. I have had LCA bushings so badly seized to the carrier bolts that I had to sawzall through them, and they looked like a single piece of metal in the cut. But they never made noise, the rubber apparently twists enough to accomodate suspension motion even at the outside pivots.
One of my front most body mounts are bad so I can tell you exactly what the noise sounds like. When I go slow over a speed bump with my window down, it sounds like a groaning, crunching noise, like rusty metal breaking free or something. Yeah...I checked my struts first even though it's not them (they're new, aside from other things). I also checked tie rods, ball joints, wheel bearings, etc.
For cost, quick-struts with the springs pre-installed cost something like $120 each on Amazon if you're inclined. Would be direct OEM replacement with none of the improvements that come with better shocks like Bilsteins, but you do not need a strut compressor so the job would be very easy to do in a driveway with a decent jack and some hand tools. I would at a minimum Google the body mount issue first across all of the F-Alpha truck platforms, and maybe change the sway bar bushings for $20 or so first.