Monday, February 21, 2011 - 10:38 am, by: Tom Richards(Tomr)
i have had both the lhs and rhs lower control arm bushes fail. They have both pulled apart.(at low speed)
looking at the boot, it is held on the metal housing by a loop of lock wire. If you remove the lock wire, you can slide the boot up and refill it and the joint with new grease.Then re lock wire the boot . To me, this seems an easy and useful job that can be done to extend the life of the ball joints. Any opinions??
Monday, February 21, 2011 - 01:29 pm, by: Boris Siljanoski(Z2tt)
Hi,
It depends if it's lost grease in the first place, if the ball joint boot is not torn it should not have lost it's original grease.
But yes that cir clip is removable, but it's kind of hard sometimes to remove and put it back on without bending or stretching it. I ended up stretching mine and could never get it to sit back, so I used a small cable tie and it did the job perfect.
Monday, February 21, 2011 - 04:02 pm, by: Boris Siljanoski(Z2tt)
Hi,
Yeah mine was not a circlip so to say, it's a springy piece of metal looped around two times and to get it undone you got to dig the end of it and dig it up.
I don't know if Toyota has the Ball joint boots as a Genuine Part and I'm not sure how you would replace them aswell, I only know how to take the part off to put grease in it.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 02:31 pm, by: Tom Richards(Tomr)
thks brett, bought a set at bursons today(~$17/pr), repacked the ball joint and all feels great. The old boot cover was intact, but was starting to get small surface cracks. My experience is once they split and let the grease out and water/dirt in , the life of the balljoint is over.