"Blessing in disguise"
Well, I had a pleasant evening.
Last week, i went to get my state safety inspection, cause Virginia (I'm from Ft. Lauderdale, FL so I don't necessarily like this process, but oh well). Failed on 3 things; 1 headlight out, 3rd/center break light out, and a cracked passenger-side lower-control arm bushing. The 2 lights that were bad were working the night before, which was just annoying, but replaced on my own. The mechanics there wanted $350 to replace the bad bushing. I said F' that and spoke with my buddy about it. After speaking about it, we agreed that due to the age of the car and that the driver's side bushing was on it's way out too, to just replace both of the controls arms, which was substantially cheaper at $100 for both front wheel arms.
Last night, took it over and got to work. He's done this kind of job plenty of times before, but his first time on a Honda. He wasn't too happy about how particular parts are laid out, but eventually we got things rolling. Removing the control arm from the ball joint was the primary concern and the most difficult, but gratuitous hammering finally knocked them loose. All was well, and got everything on properly. I was actually in the process of pulling out of his driveway until we heard a "tick tick tick" noise when I started to drive away. He was like "wtf is that?" Drove around the block to listen for it and brought it back into his garage, determining it was the driver's side wheel.
Well, after careful examination, initially concerned it was coming from the transmission, I looked underneath the spindle, and right above the ball joint, there's a metal clamp ring with the raised crimped portion that was just barely rubbing against the top of the ball joint, making that noise every time it rotated. Well, this was the "blessing in disguise" because upon identifying the location, he started to more or less freak out, noticing that the ball joint was pretty much popping out from the control arm mount. Additionally, the fact that it did not have a C-clip concerned him even more. He felt my ball joints have actually been like this for awhile and has never seen anything like that before, believing I was lucky nothing has happened yet, saying that I had to get this replaced or else I shouldn't be driving it at all. I promptly tried to do some research, digging into this forum and elsewhere, finding some videos, and whatnot. Unfortunately a lot of the posts were lengthy and was forced to do a lot more skimming due to the time sensitivity of figuring things out.
Now, I was lucky that the control arm set actually came with a set of ball joints, but we needed 2 things- a clamp set and a specific sized socket (IIRC 36MM) as that was one of the only sizes he didn't seem to have (let him keep it though) to take the spindle off. It was about 820pm at this point and autozone closed at 9. Called immediately and certainly lucked out that they had both. Went down, got the parts and even picked up 2 other ball joint types, just to be sure, noting how the one on my car (OEM) was smooth and no C-clip and the replacement ones I got have the ridges w/ the z-top for grease.
Getting to work was a slow start, concerned about possibly damaging the short-shaft, but was able to push the short-shaft back without issue and cleanly removing the spindle. It was smooth sailing after that. We had to jerry rig the clamp tool to make it work, but mounted the spindle to a vice, and ensured the new ball joint was driving straight. (as an aside, we looked up a lot of videos to see how people were doing this. Nope, seems the method people were using was just beating the thing in with a hammer). After a lot of frustration and hammering of things, aligning the clamp and brute strength, we got it on and everything back onto the car.
What was originally a 2 hour job that night turned into close to 6 hour one.
It was about an hour or so drive back home last night, but hell, there's a significant difference in the smoothness of the drive now. It's distinctly smoother on the drivers side, especially when going over small bumps and what not. We're going to change out the passenger side ball joint at some point in the near future as well. I need to put a new tie rod on the drivers side anyhow so might as well knock it all out. Think we'll be doing this on a weekend morning though.
All is good now. Going back to get the re-inspection on Saturday. Once these issues are cleared up, I can finally move onto needed aesthetic updates..
-TC