[Tom in NW DC]

I have a bent knuckle on my front wheel assembly -- the knuckle that the brake caliper is bolted to. Trouble is, I have no idea how it happened. We had been on the highway for 300 miles; a clean, dry, smooth road. Had just pulled out from a rest stop and heard scraping from the wheel. We hit nothing, no pothole, curb, pole. We were 5 miles from a Honda dealer and they pulled the tire and there was the bent knuckle that was canting the brake assembly and causing it to scrape on the disc. I will have to replace the assembly but I would really like to know how this could have happened when I do so. This is a big, heavy duty hunk of steel. It would have to have been hit really hard and heavy to bend like this. Is it possible to have hit a pothole or something several hundred miles or several days before this scraping appeared, and have this problem just pop up later?

 

[William Wiles]

Is the part scraping a movable part as the pads wear? If so could have happened a long time ago and the pads just wore enough to allow them to touch.

 

[Tom in NW DC]

Thanks for answering, William. Yes the caliper moves, but the pads were fine. One moment there was no scraping, the next there was a huge noise. The first Honda dealer that looked at it on our trip put a ~1/8th inch washer on the caliper mount to shim out the caliper to vertical -- and it fixed the issue. But when we came home and went to our regular Honda dealer, they pulled the tire -- and they couldn't see any bend in the knuckle! And they say the washer is getting crushed. So they remove it, we buy new tires, get alligned...etc. This was last July. Off and on ever since we occaisionally hear a scraping sound from that wheel -- with the wheel's rotation, gets softer and louder but never as bad as it did last summer on the trip. We take it into our dealer 3 times and they can find nothing. We took it in yesterday and voila -- they tell me the knuckle is bent! What I am wondering is if something else is moving that would change the dynamic of the bent knuckle and the coming and going of the scraping sound? Thanks for having put some thought into this!