I still have yet to attain either jackstands or ramps (friend of mine said his dad has some ramps sitting around a garage doing nothing, but you know how that goes), and it was about oil change time, so I took my max to the local infiniti dealer and had them grease up the suspension while they were at it.

I'm not sure of all the spots they'd get as part of a standard lube...I have some guesses. But the hard creeking noise in my front suspension is still there (basically, whenever the nose moves even a bit it seems. Quite often). When I'm able to get under the car, what should I check first? I'll have my haynes with me, but I don't think it covers all suspension bushings. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

 

Suspension creaks, crunches and squeaks are sometimes tough to figure out. There are no lube points on our syspension system. No grease fittings, nothing! Just a strut bearing that dries out and needs replacing sometimes.

Creaks can come from worn or dried out bushings on the control arm & sway bar. Crunch type of noises when you turn your steering wheel lock to lock usually point to strut bearings or if your on lowering springs, it's spring coils rubbing on each other. A quick fix for the spring noise is to spray WD40 or lots of WET tire dressing all over your springs. If the noise goes away, you've found your weak point. Spraying down the coils doesn't make it go away for a long time. Give it a week and your back to square one again.

There are quite a few ways to attack spring noise. Coil wrap, new isolators from Nissan or any other number of ways to keep your coils from rubbing against each other. There's a thread in the stickies that describe what it is exactly that causes this noise in our cars and a few suggestions of how to fix it.

I'd be very interested in what your dealer did when you asked them to "Lube up your suspension"

 

I tried to ask them exactly what it was they lubed...the guy said "Oh, just the normal points, you know...door hinges, points on the suspension, places like that." I figured that meant they could have just squirted in the area of hte control arm/sway bar bushings, but I've never really taken a look at these up close (just some pics in the haynes), and don't know how covered up they are.

The noise sounds to me like a bushing creak. If they're simply dried out, can't you grease up the bushings? Chances are mine are torn...I forget if the haynes explains how to replace the control arm/sway bar bushings at all, or if I could find a write-up on the .org. Might be worth grabbing some polys regardless. Course, my dust covers are all torn and am still riding on stock springs/struts that have seen a number of salty nebraska winters. I figure it'd be best to let them see one more and replace all that in the spring though. I don't think I can put up with this creaking for that long though - it sounds like an old fishing boat resting at port.

 

I gotta replace those on my car someday ha ha