The May Distraction

Its been pretty quite here as of late, I have been distracted by other things; ReaperCon, ex-wife passing (memorial service tomorrow) and my son managing to unseat the ball joint on his car. I could at least fix my son's car, or so I thought.

We opted to replace the entire control arm to avoid having to cut off the ball joint which is riveted to the control arm. I figured that sense we were in there we should go ahead and replace the bearings and after we had it apart the brake rotor as well.

Everything was going quite well until we had to seat the ball joint back into the steering knuckle. It proved to be almost impossible with the control arm ends already in place so I unbolted them, got the ball joint into place and then spent three days trying to get the control arm back in place. I eventually had to take the control arm back out unseat the ball joint and start again. Fortunately once I finally had it right I had it all back in place in about and hour and a half. The hardest bit was getting the brake pads back into place. Fortunately one of my son's mechanic friends stopped by and had the brakes in place in about 15 minutes. I had already been struggling with it for 45 minutes.

Its all back together and runs fine and the brakes even work! But it ate up my entire Memorial Day weekend and we had to share my car for a week.

Tools and parts, originally I figured about six hours...5 days later and about 14 hours and I was actually done.

The offending culprit a worn out ball joint that popped out of  the socket on the control arm

The brake rotor is off and I'm ready to remove the hub

Hub is off and the new control arm is in place with the ball joint seated.

Oops, forgot to put the stabilizer linkage back into place. Decided to replace these worn parts as well