When changing wheels recently from winter to summer tyres, I noticed some excessive play in the front wheels doing the 3-9’o clock test. I’d also noticed some clunky sounds from there when hitting small bumps in the road before, so there was no real surprise to find that both front wishbone ball joints were worn out.
The ball joints cannot be replaced separately on this car, you must replace the whole wishbone. I ordered a pair of new wishbones from ebay for about $80 each, which is about a sixth of a typical aftermarket part available locally, or at a guess a tenth of the OEM part from the dealership.
The procedure for the replacement is near identical for each side. The first order of business after raising the car and removing the wheel, is to undo and remove the pinch bolt in the steering knuckle that locks the upright bolt from the ball joint (15 and 16 mm sockets). Then undo the five bolts in the sub-frame that holds the wishbone, three of which are visible below. A breaker bar will be required (18 mm).
Now use a splitter fork on the ball joint to free the upright bolt from the steering knuckle. You’ll want to take care not to damage the heat-shield between the joint and the brake disc, on both sides I deformed it a bit so it made a grinding noise when the wheels turned and I had to bend it back out from the disc.
When the upright bolt is free, the whole wishbone should come out without too much trouble. You might need to lift up the stabilizer bar that sits right on top of the rear wishbone mount. You can use a lever on the bar directly, or lift the knuckle like I did here (I have a vague feeling I’m breaking some cardinal rule of wrenching by lifting the brake discs, but no harm seemed to be done).
When you get the old part out, verify that the new one is somewhat similar.
Also, have some fun seeing just how worn that old joint was.
Now, for installing the new part, I found it easiest to lift the steering knuckle (by the brake discs, as pictured above) a bit so as both to lift the stabilizer bar and the wheel knuckle to make space for the wishbone, and then position the wishbone mountings on the sub-frame. Then lower the steering knuckle (taking some care that the upright bolt doesn’t slash open the drive shaft gaiter) and fit the five bolts in the sub-frame loosely.
The problem at this point is to push the ball join (on the wishbone) down while positioning the steering knuckle to allow the upright bolt to enter the pinch hole.
This is a bit difficult because pushing the wishbone down requires some force. Also, if you are clumsy like me you will have pulled the driveshaft out of whatever sort of joint is hiding under that rubber gaiter, as you can see from the shapeless gaiter in the next picture, which also shows my solution to the problem.
The solution is to stick the splitting fork over the wishbone so that it extends forwards, and then use a long crowbar to get ample leverage over the wishbone. That is, the fork locks onto the wishbone, and the crowbar pushes down on the fork. I use a damp rag to get more friction between the splitting fork, wishbone and crowbar.
This way I can hold down the crowbar with my leg and control the height of the wishbone/ball joint while having both hands free to position the driveshaft, upright bolt and pinch hole correctly.
Once the upright bolt is seated in the pinch hole, fit the pinch bolt and tighten that and the five sub-frame bolts to 70 Nm. I’ve been told it’s a common problem that the upright bolt gets a bit of wiggle room and starts to grind out the pinch hole oval, requiring the whole steering knuckle to be replaced. So you might want to tighten the pinch bolt a bit extra.
On one side the drive shaft gaiter looked like this after I was done:
You can see the driveshaft has been pulled out too far. I was able to pull and twist the gaiter back into shape though.
Frodes blog 