Interesting job. Bit of pain but really gives you a good understanding of how the frontend works.

Inspection showed that the ball joints themselves all looked really good. No play and the boots were in good shape. Bushings seemed to be another story. If you grabbed onto the thrust arm, you could deflect the arm if you pushed/pulled on the arm itself. Bushing itself *looked* ok - plastic plug was all there and no tears. Still, figured all the track work, stiff sways, etc had softened up the bushing and it was time for new ones. Additionally, the car had really started tramlining badly in the last couple months which was really annoying.

Decided to just do the bushings themselves and not the whole arms. Co$t was a big factor. 2 thrust arms, 2 control arms from BMA were getting close to $400. 2 thrust bushings and 2 control bushings were just $56 or so. Much better.

After consulting with the one of our resident experts, decided to go for just a bushing replacement. Bill suggested pulling the entire "steering knuckle" vs attemping to pull all three ball joints. Huge suggestion! All I needed to do was to pop one tie rod end and then pull the three bolts holding the knuckle to the strut and the 2 bolts for the bushings. Of course, to get access to all this, I had to drop the strut and hang the brake caliper.

Once the knuckle was out, I took them both to a local Midas and they pressed in the new bushings for $50 for all 4.

Re-installed the setup and whoohoo! What a nice improvement! The car was much much stiffer overall, better turn-in response and the tramlining was basically gone. VERY happy with the results. Worst part of the job (I think) was figuring out how to torque up the bolts with a load on the front end. The thrust arm bushings need 96 (!) foot/lbs - not easy when you have the wheels loaded. I used some 4x4 blocks to set the wheels up but that 18" pull on the torque wrench didn't help... Some ramps would have been really nice for sure!

Moral to the story I suppose is that those bushings seem to last about 60K miles and then they get soft. Even when they are not torn, they loose their stiffness. As these bushings work in tandem to locate the bottom of the strut, the strut then can move dramatically contributing to tramlining and other front end issues. I wonder if this isn't a cause of some of the tramlining complaints for our cars?

Cheers!

Jeff