Sloppy steering

[Col]

It will be your lower arms.

In particular the flat voided bush.

You can fit new arms complete, about £40 a side plus labour.

Or have the flat bush renewed in each arm.

I changed these bushes / arms three times on my Golf until I finally settled on upgraded Audi TT bushes.

[TDiBoraSam]

OK, thanks for that. I'll have the lower arms looked at. I presume a decent garage can detect wear/play quite easily?

[m0cea]

Have you checked your tyre pressures?

Seem to remember a tyre guy telling me that VW's known for leaky rims once they are a few years old.
The bottoms arms are a safe bet though I'm just about to do mine.

[TDiBoraSam]

Yes, I've checked tyre pressures and they're spot on. Tyres are also nearly new.
I think I'm going to have some uprated powerflex bushes fitted.

Just so I'm clear....Is the lower arm the same thing as the wishbone?

[m0cea]

Yes the lower arm is the same as wishbone.

You mention that you have had new tyres different brands and models of tyre can cause under or over steer. I went from Mitchelin Premracy to Goodyear NCT5 Touring and it was like steering a tanker with the Goodyears on and I never felf confident with them on. I'm now on Continental Sport contact 2 now which are an improvement over the Goodyears but still not in the same league as the Mitchelin. Still have Mitchelin on the rear tho and are still legal after 60k.

[TDiBoraSam]

I've been doing a bit of research into this steering problem, and now I'm getting a bit confused! Is the track control arm the same thing as the lower arm, which can also be called the wishbone?

I'm looking at getting a specialist to fit some powerflex bushes to the front to attempt to tighten up the steering. Can anyone tell me which particular bushes are most likely to tighten things up? There is an entire front kit of bushes available, but I don't want to buy a whole kit if I actually only need one type of bush.

Something has definately happened, because the steering was fine until about 3 weeks ago, and since then it's become progressively "looser" and unstable, especially in windy conditions and when cornering. I'm having to make exagerated inputs at the wheel to achieve the desired amount of turn and everything feels out of sync.