another "new bolt" thread

I'm replacing the lower control arm/ball joint on my 2000 3.8. The manual says to replace the bolts that hold the arm onto the chassis as well as the pinch bolt. When you purchase the control arm the pinch bolt comes with it but no chassis bolts. So I go to Ford and talk to the parts guy. He looks up on the computer and finds that the last time they had 1 or 2 of these bolts in stock it was 2005. He says as well that they "do a lot of lower control arms". As well, when Ford gets the control arms in they come only with the pinch bolt.

Sooooo, he said without a doubt when a control arm is replaced they don't use new, Ford service manual specified, bolts.

I don't know whether this clears things up or muddies the water?~:confused:

Piper

When I put new arms on our 99 the rear chasis bolt was worn so I replaced them all. Cant remember where I found them but they are out there.

Well, there you have it. It's totally up to us to decide if we should reuse or replace a nut, bolt or whatever. Clearly the dealer is not one to look for answers. But I'm sure their machanics are making judgement calls on what to reuse and what to replace, not blindly putting back bad hardware. That's what I'm saying, that we can do the same as the dealer mechanic. When the bolt is too worn like kahjdh found on his pivot bolts, you replace them. I have serviced the lower control arm on several fords without needing to replace one without a single failure or sleep lost, but I would have if necessary. The directive to replace the pivot bolt varies from manual to manual, though they do all agree on replacing the lower pinch bolt, at the very least when replacing the control arm.

Bottom line,,, we need to make our own judgement call as we can't get good guidance from the experts.

Hi
For what it is worth, my control arm bolts are OEM at the frame mount at 151K having replaced the arms at 100K.

So I did the drivers control arm yesterday. Went quite well. The only slight difficulty was getting the ball joint out of the hub where the pinch bolt sits. It was rusted and tight and took some grunt. The 2 nuts and bolts on the frame were in great shape. I didn't replace them. A little cleaning was all that was needed. Job took about 1.5 hours but I'm working on my open driveway, it was -10'C so I was moving slower than in a heated garage. It was a bit tricky getting the 2 frame bolts torqued to spec as the weight of the van needs to be on the control arm. I did find a really long extension on my torque wrench to help and turning the wheel to expose the rear control arm frame nut/bolt to work. The old control arm was pretty loose and I'm glad I did replace it now as I had thought I'd wait until the weather warms up a bit.

FWIW, my :2cents:

Piper