In 2004, Saturn issued a recall for broken rear wheel camber bolts. Vue’s don’t normally come with camber adjust cam nuts, Since my Vue had the cam nuts on the camber bolts, I suspect either the recall was complied with, or at some point, an alignment was done and the cam nuts were installed.
Last week I took my Vue in to have the rear alignment checked. They discovered the head of the bolt on the passenger side was broken off and the bolt was frozen in the bushing. The frozen bolt was probably a good thing as this prevented it from falling out.
A little history on our Vue first. Our 2003 Saturn Vue has been a good toad. We bought it 4 years ago as it was heading to the junk yard. The previous owner performed an engine / transmission swap from the infamous bad VTI transmission to a 5 speed manual transmission, but he could never get it to run after that. We discovered that two electrical connectors on the engine had gotten reversed during the swap (Throttle body and FI rail got swapped) , This destroyed the ECM and a sensor. Once these issues were resolved and a used ECM out of a 2005 manual transmission Vue was installed, it ran like a top.
Two weeks ago we were visiting the Flamingo National park in the Everglades. While walking back to our car I noticed the rear wheels seemed like they were cambered inward at the top. When I looked at the tires, both rear tires were worn badly on the insides, indicating a sever toe-out. The left side, an original tire, age unknown, but I put about 40k miles on it, was worn to the wear bumps in the tire The right tire, which was 2 years old and about 25k miles, wasn’t warn as bad, still had 1/8 inch tread above the wear bumps.
I was concerned because I didn’t know when this problem started, and I had a 60 mile drive back to Homestead, the nearest place to get any work done. I looked underneath and didn’t see anything obvious. I wiggled both tires/wheels, and everything seemed tight. When we got to Homestead, I checked the tires again, there didn’t seem to be any new wear, so I was now reasonably confident that this was a long term problem and the wear was something that happened over 10s of thousands of miles and not something that just happened. Because the wear on the left side was so bad, I decided to stop at the nearest Walmart and installed two new rear tires. If this was indeed a long term problem, the new tires would get us home, which was 1500 miles away.. During the trip home, Whenever we stopped I’d look at the rear tires on the toad. I was happy to see that there was no detectable wear during this trip, so this was a long term problem that I hadn’t noticed before.
Before we left on this trip in December, I had the tire shop install two new tires on the front and do a alignment check. When I looked at the alignment paper from December, Yes, there was a toe out and camber problem with the rear wheels.. I still don’t understand why I didn’t catch this in December?????
When I returned to the shop last week, They once again verified the problem, but noted the broken head on the right side so couldn’t make any adjustments.. The shop wanted to replace both upper arms and install new bolts. So I took the Vue back home to fix this problem myself.
I took photos of the bolts and cam nuts. I also measured the camber with a level. Note that all four cam nuts appear to be at / near their center adjustment. When I re-assemble, I’ll adjust them to correct for the alignment numbers that were recorded in December by the alignment shop. We’ll see how close I get them when the Alignment shop re-does the alignment when I’m finished..
REMOVING BOLTS
I soaked the Camber and Toe bolts in PB Blaster for the day. The three bolts that weren’t broke came out. The cam nuts came off fairly easily. The bolts were frozen a little but unscrewed out of the bushings.
REMOVING BROKEN BOLT
The bolt with the broken head was rusted / frozen in solid in the bushing. I removed the cam nut and tried to twist the bolt with vice grips. no good. Before resorting to cutting it off, I decided to try pulling it out. I put a nut on the exposed threads where the cam nut was, and tighten the nut. As I tightened the nut, it pulled the broken bolt out of the bushing.
CRACKED FLANGE
I noticed that there was a stress crack on the cam nut flange that had the broken bolt head. This was probably cause by flexing of the camber arm because of the missing bolt head. I was able to weld the crack closed .
NEW BOLTS
I replaced all four bolts, Flange head, 12mm x 1.75 thread x 80mm length, 10.9 hardness. I looked at Lowes and Home Depot, neither had the bolts. I found them at Menards, $3.50 each.
I set the cams at their original positions, This should be close to the original bad alignment settings. I then moved them an approximate amount to correct for the correct alignment. I’ll see how close I am when I take it in for alignment later this week.