Steering Shaking/Loose

[SawyerRanger]

Lately the steering wheel has been very shaky and loose. The truck also moves to the left very badly (probably alignment?). But after I make a turn, the steering wheel does not return to the correct position smoothly, instead it does it in 'jerks'. There's been plenty of new potholes around here because of the snow plows, and I've hit more then enough of them I think to cause an alignment issue, but could there be other factors involved, such as ball joints or tie rods? I've never had anything on the front end re-done, since the truck only has 55,000 miles (owned it since 48,000). It's a 99 XLT 4.0

 

[fordboi415]

Pot holes won't cause any alignment problems unless they are extremely deep and you are constantly hitting them, I would ckeck your power steering fluid and make sure its full for starters

 

[se7en]

if I was you I would check the tie rods. get it up on a frame lift and see if the tie rods have play. I had the problem and it turned out to be the inner tie rods after I inspected it. Big tires are hard on stock steering components. mine ran me 50 bucks for both sides from autozone. I was recently told to upgrade to Moog tie rods so you might want to look into that.

 

[Kenny992wd]

i have pretty much the same problem with my truck.

 

[canyoncritter]

check you rack make sure its still tight to the frame.

 

[SawyerRanger]

Just figured I'd post up and tell everyone how this is going. PS Fluid is topped off, no leaks in that system. Tie rods are in shape, as well as all the bearings. Found out the real problem for all the shaking... A belt got busted in my tire. There's a nice arched bump that's been causing all of this, thank god I caught it before it exploded on me. Truck has about 60,000 miles so I guess it makes sense that it would need new tires anyway. Oh well, wasn't really planning on doing tires right now, but I guess it's time to go up a size in tires