My advice to anyone doing ball joints on those old beaters is just to pull the lower control arm completely off and take it to someone with a good hydraulic press and have them press it out and press the new one in. I am getting too old for all the do-it-yourself-jackwith without the right tools, and I don't heal as fast as I used to. Seeing as you need to get the car on an alignment rack once you are done anyway, you might as well make friends with the local quality alignment shop and have them do the in/out for you--anybody who is any good won't mind you doing some of the grunt work. Volvo makes pretty clear that the new ball joints, upper or lower, should be tack welded in, say 1/4" X 3, once they are pressed in. They are right on this--don't argue the point. Some folks nowadays--Suzuki to name one--want you to do a 100% weldin, which to me is a little spotty, as it is entirely too easy to overheat things with a welder and inadvertently cook the crap out of your new part. Oops.
More to the point, the facts of front end life are 1) Front ends don't last any longer than engines do, so you can figure on doing a complete front end about every time you do an engine,* and 2) front end components tend to wear out fairly evenly across the board. Replacing just one front end worn out component mostly doesn't make sense. Order of failure on these cars is generally 1) idler arm bushing 2) lower control arm bushings 3) lower ball joints and 3) everything else. Generally once the idler arm bushing goes, you've got some time on the rest of things--30K or so miles at least, generally, before the rest of the components start to crap out on you. By the time lower ball joints go, it is time to think about redoing everything and get the thing driving back to where it ought to be. On all these cars, I would automatically replace the lower control arm bushings at the same time as the ball joint as a matter of routine 'cuz they are, I guarantee, shot. They are fairly cheap and not at all tough for someone to press in/out. There will be a big and very noticeable improvement in ride and steering/handling once you do.
*Waal, sort of. Replacement front end parts nowadays tend to be crappy and somewhat to much inferior to original equipment. Part of our wonderful push to globalization--inferior cheap car rubber parts are made in China or India and sold here for a little cheaper than OE, and everybody is happy, right?
Last edited by Dan White; Dec 9th, 2006 at 17:10.
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