Steering wont self center after a turn!

[Mustang1989]

My '05 250 has an issue where it won't self-center after you make a turn. You have to manually force it, or it will stay going in that direction. It happens on average, every other turn. This happened to me about a year and a half ago and the shop said it was the front u-joints. They replaced them and it fixed the problem up until a week ago. Now it's back, and worse than before. It can be scary at times. Any ideas?

[skanj0]

Steering box is toast. Change it ASAP.

[purplehorn1977]

also when you do the steering box check ball joints thats what smoked the steering gear on 2 of our trucks when the truck is off the ground you should be able to turn the wheels by hand back and forth if you can the ball joints are either dry or junk but chances are they are junk. the steering gears are cheap compared to the ball joint change. think the last steering gear cost us 200 bucks the ball joints and seals were like 300.

[Big Angry Hillbilly]

Could be a lot of things.

Seized up ball joints, seized up steering stabilizer, bad steering box, the list goes on and on and on...

Disconnect the steering linkage from the wheels and see if they turn freely from side to side with the wheels off the ground, should give you a pretty good indication of ball joint condition as the feller above me said there.

[Mustang1989]

Why would changing out the the front u-joints fix the problem the last time? That never made sense to me?

[Mustang1989]

I brought the truck in yesterday, and just got off the phone with them this morning. The mechanic says the front u-joints ,tie rods ends, and drag link are all shot, and with parts and labor the total will be around $1,900.

Am I getting ripped off? I this common on an '05 with 140k miles? Shouldn't the u-joints last longer than a year and a half?

[EArmsF350]

have a 2000 350 does the same thing, mechanic says ball joints are too tight, is going to retorque to correct specs and see if that fixes the problem.