’12 Caravan brake noise that’s not brake noise.

2012 Grand Caravan, 3.6 automatic, with 50K on the ticker. This van has had all the pads & rotors replaced at my shop by other techs. The front brakes replaced in one visit and the rear brakes in another visit within about a month of each other. The last repair was about six weeks ago.

Yesterday, the van came back with a complaint for grinding noise while braking. Outbound test drive consisted of combination of city and highway driving and shows no pulsations or vibrations anywhere in the vehicle and certainly no brake noise. At one point, I did hear a noise that sounded like a coil spring groaning on a perch in the front. Once I turned the van around to return from test drive, I did suddenly get a loud grinding brake noise in the front consistent with metal on metal contact. This noise came abruptly, left abruptly, and was repeatable, but not very consistently. When grinding was happening, it was in stop & go/city driving conditions.

Returned to shop, lifted vehicle shook wheels for loose suspension/steering parts, none found. Removed front wheels; visual inspection of brakes showed no irregular wear on any rotor surface. No scoring, scratches, galling, gouges, nothing. I removed pads calipers, pads and brackets. The pads are still in new condition. Confirmed rotors still look awesome. No caliper hardware is showing any abnormal anything. I moved on to inspected the entire front steering and suspension and everything is tight with no signs of any physical damage that screamed metal on metal contact. In short, there’s no evidence anywhere to say that anything is wrong at all.

We’ve had a lot of snow the last couple days so, of course, the wheel wells were packed up with snow. I thoroughly washed out both front wheel wells and tried to see as well as I could up the struts and at the spring perches to follow up on that spring groan noise I heard. My visibility was limited, but for what I could see, there was no damage of any kind to spring isolators or the caps up top. I couldn’t see any rocks or chunks of anything else peculiar that might cause the spring groan.

I reevaluated the steering and suspension linkages one more time using a pry bar to load up any bushings, linkages, and body mounts I could. At this point, I gave up, scuffed the pads with 60 grit on a sanding block, reassembled everything, and went for a last test drive. I could repeat the grind just once and the groan once or twice by itself. I gave the van back to my customer without any answers as it what it was, but I did decide to rule out the brakes as the source.

Has anybody else come across a noise like this. I believe any Caravan 08 and up should have the same suspension.