What's up CL. I have an 01 GS430 with 145k and lately after I get an alignment it drives really good. Then about a week or two later after hitting a pothole or two the alignment goes out of wack and the steering wheel is tilted to the right. Now before I used to hit potholes all the time and this never happened. And it wasn't even any big bumps it might even be irrelevant. Also the car makes an ANNOYING creaking noise like old house stairs when turning to the right only and the mechanic has diagnosed the combo of both as a bad rack and pinion aka steering rack. Can anyone confirm that this actually happens? I've never really heard of it going bad. Also as a side note I noticed when going over an uneven bumpy road the steering wheel is very unstable but other then that it drives really well. I need to be sure it's the rack before spending that type of
money. He seemed really confident about it

It's something. You might have bent a tie rod or something. Have the entire rack inspected.

I mean have you ever heard of someone needing to have their entire rack replaced? I'll be so happy if it was just the tie rods. But as a note they were done about 20k miles ago like 2 years ago. But I guess a few NYC potholes can easily kill new tie rods right?

From what I remember bad tie rods just cause loose steering. My car drives straight but straight is slightly tilted to the right. Very weird. I usually remember bad tie rods causing loose steering and it won't drive straight but someone correct me please I'm preying the mechanic is wrong and it IS the tie rods.

A bad tire rod end (worn bushing) will cause loose steering. A bent tie rod end, in and of itself, is less likely to do so. Although it may cause the steering to be off-center.

As it turns out the last place I went to never aligned my back wheels and never locked the steering wheel in place, but whats weird is it felt like the car was driving good until a week later I noticed the wheel was crooked, but maybe it was the entire time and I never noticed. To make a long story short, knock on wood everything seems fine and I am going to go **** on that shop and show them what crap job they did to my car and that they need a new alignment guy because he thinks its okay to align cars without using the steering wheel restraint

Word of advice and lesson learned, dont ever align your car at a place that doesnt give printouts and doesnt lock the steering wheel in place, I shouldve known, but I thought they were good because all they work on is S550s and all $100,000 cars. I feel bad for all those cars driving around with screwed up alignemnts

Lexus dealer told me I'll have to eventually replace my steering rack because of a very slight power steering fluid leak, but I'm not worried about it, they told me my upper ball joints were failing and I spent 750$ on new ones only to find out the old ones weren't even bad