How do I diagnose a problem with strut bearings?

[clydesdale]

I had my car off the road for 5 weeks and now the steering is crap. Intermittently the car doesn't want to re-center without help and the wheel is stiff. Someone mentioned strut bearings. How do I diagnose them and is the above a symptom of bad strut bearings?

[jlevie]

Those could be symptoms of bad strut bearings. To tell if the strut bearings are bad, you have to remove the struts and take the bearing off. But this could also be from bad tie rods or outer ball joints in the control arms.

[clydesdale]

That really sucks because both the tie rod ends and the control arms are fairly new. If any of those, I think it would be from the tie rod ends. The have been removed from the spindle several times for rack and pinion replacements. This is the 5th rack in 3 years. I had to switch vendors because of all the leaky crap they sold me.
The control arms were replaced about 3 years and 30 miles ago. I would hope they are still good. The crappy part is the car drove great until I took it off the road for 5 weeks.

[jlevie]

If done with a ball joint press, the disconnection of the tie rods won't have had any bad affects on the tie rod ball joints. Those control arms, if of OE quality, should still be good. But if they are ebay junk...