Have seen a few odd posts about this issue but thought it was worthwhile starting a thread on it to try and keep everything together.

Have recently had major problems with the steering that resulted in the steering rack having to be rebuilt as well as replacement of:

Uni Joint
Upper and Lower Control Arms and bushes
Ball Joints

Pretty much all new steering gear.

Fortunately all were covered under the Alliance extended warranty.

Interestingly, the problem initially presented itself on the M3 in the form of the steering becoming incredibly heavy as if the power steering system had failed.

Interested to hear about others experience with this problem. 'Black Betty' Java Black RRS 07 TDV6

on our MY06 we had a new steering rack at 40K (the upgraded version, which i think it means it now had some semblance of dampening),

At the 80K Mark it had

new lower control arm bushes
new ball joints (the new and improved design apparently)

On the last service they recommended that the upper control arm bushes may require changing at the next service, it was coming up to 124K at that point.

The Indie service company tell me that bushes/ball joints are a common theme across the Sport and D3's, soon to be D4's as well

Cheers

Jim Another Pommie Bar Steward down under

MY20 Defender 110 SE P400 Eiger/Ebony
MY10 3.0 RRS TDv6 Fuji/Ebony/Anigre

Mine's had the same over the last 11 months / 30k miles. When I bought it at 22k miles, I had them replace the bushes / balljoints to cure the knocking (that's just started to re-appear). The steering column was changed at 13k miles and most recently the upper & lower steering joints have been changed to stop the rattling.

In fact, the only original part of the steering is the rack itself  Ex-G4 Challenge RRS HSE, BV55 YZE. Subtle shade of orange ! Now registered YZE481 G4RRS in Melbourne.