Broken tie rod while driving !

I had a tie rod come apart!! At first I thought I had lost a steer tire or something crazy, but thankfully I was able to safely stop. I literally had just turned off the highway and onto a service road. When I got a look at it, I #### my pants a little. I was driving a empty tank truck at the time, but was about a half hour away from having a full load of fluid on and heading back down the highway


I have never seen anything like this myself and by no means am I a mechanic. But how! does this happen ? It was my first time driving this truck in almost a year, as we frequently move between differnt trucks / jobs and I obviously didn't catch any issues during my pre trip. Having a bit of a hard time here accepting how ridiculously close to I was to a catastrophic crash.

 

Lack of maintenance

 

What kind of truck? Freightliner currently has a recall going on about tie rod ends.

 

It was either bad for a long time and it finally gave or it was defective. You’d know it was bad if you were getting really bad bump steer.

 

Worn out and not checked often enough.

 

Part of doing a pretrip. I had a steering output sdhaft break on a Cascadia 9 years ago. Just can't check everything.

 

When you grab the tie rods they should feel tight , not loose, if the ball joint of the tie rod end is bad you should be able to feel the slop, I use a pair of channe-lock plyers to check them about once a week or so.The shaft coming out of the steering gearbox you tap with a ballpeen hammers.

 

The OM and I hate it when that happens.

 

Could happen on any vehicle, regardless of brand. tie rod ends are a press fit, need to be checked a minimum of monthly by the driver, trainers can barely drive the truck let alone teach how to pretrip the equipment. My first and or monthly pretrip takes me a good 30 to 45 minutes.

 

Yup. That's the reason why I crawl under mine and do my own grease jobs. I'll take the time and look around while I'm under there. It's sad so many nowadays don't have the mechanical aptitude to even recognize a problem, much less isolate and determine how critical the needed repair is for safe operation.

Good to "see" you, BTW!