If you know you haven't changed the ball joints out before, you will be just fine with the Regular Size. If you have changed them out before, but don't know which ones to order, here are a few tips.
Please visit our website for more information on this topic.
First off... what is an Oversized Ball Joint?
It's simply a ball joint body with a large outer diameter measurement than factory made for the specific purpose of fitting in a hole that has been enlarged. It is not a heavy duty ball joint and nothing else other than the outer diameter is bigger.
The need for over sized ball joints comes only from :
1) Someone prior to you changed the ball joints and unknowingly installed over sized joints because that's what they were sold. They then struggled to press them into the axle and stretched the holes out.
2) Same as number one but a shop did it
3) Someone "usually an apprentice or DIY guy" decided to clean the hole with a flap wheel or some other abrasive and they hogged the hole out. (This is what oversized ball joints were meant to fix)
never ever
4) Someone, either a mechanic or DIY guy, pressed the ball joint in crooked with the press and just cranked it in rather than relieving it occasionally with a hammer (many mechanics seem to not like the hammer on clamp method) and chewed the side of the hole out with the ball joint body.
All reasons are because someone somewhere made a mistake. It's not because you wore the ball joints out really bad or because they've been changed a lot. However, if they have been changed a lot by someone incorrectly, then the holes can enlarge. Nothing is concrete. This is where it becomes hard to tell what you need. It's easy if the trucks never been touched.
Now for some signs of how to tell what you might need:
Have a hole that is beyond the size of the oversized? We can custom machine one for you... we call these the "Fat Boys". For this you will need 4 measurements inside the hole of the knuckle and then divide by 4 to get the average. WE WILL NOT MAKE A CUSTOM JOINT WITHOUT PROPER MEASUREMENTS. You need to know what they are so you can get a ball joint that will fit properly. Just guessing can result in a housing being too large or too small and a waste of your time and money because they aren't returnable. Give us a call if you need a Fat Boy and we will be happy to help.
We came across this article from Auto Quarterly and thought it was so great that we would paste it here for everyone else to enjoy. Thank you to autoquarterly.com for providing the info (update - it seems like the page is no longer working, so we apologize for the lost images connected to this article).
Over time, the joints and components on your car loosen or wear out. When the components that hold the wheels on fall out of tolerance, it can make your car handle poorly or wear your tires out much quicker. To fix the problem, all cars have adjustable components that allow you to adjust the alignment of the wheels.
There are three main properties centered around wheel alignment: toe, camber, and caster. In this article, we’ll be looking at the toe adjustment. Toe is one of the easiest adjustments to understand; just look down at your feet. If your toes point in towards each other, that’s toe-in. If they point out away from each other, that’s toe-out.
Toe is a very simple concept, but it can be a little bit difficult to understand the effects it has on your car. To start, take a look at the following diagram. It shows toe-in, but it’s easy to imagine the reverse as well, which is toe-out.
The easiest way to understand how toe effects cars is to assume that a car wants to travel in the direction the tires face. When the two front tires point towards each other, the car wants to go straight (picture it like pushing your palms together). When they point out, your car wants to turn left or right.
Generally, you want your tires to be mostly parallel. Even more extreme setups only have differences measured in fractions of an inch. However, there are reasons you might want a little bit of toe-in or toe-out.
Unlike caster and camber, which are expressed in positive or negative degrees, toe is often expressed as a simple distance measurement.
In industry terms, it’s the difference in track width as measured at the leading edge of a tire and the trailing edge of the tire. In practical terms, it’s a measurement that represents how far the wheels are turned in or away from each other.
The tires are considered to be pointed in if they angle in towards the car as the car moves forward. They are considered to be pointed out if they angle out away from the car. Sometimes, toe-in is considered positive, and toe-out is considered negative. That’s simply a way to keep all the alignment settings standardized.
There are basically two ways that toe affects a car’s performance. Adjusting the toe can make your car handle better in the corners, or it can make it easier to keep the car straight on the highway.
The good news is that adjusting the toe angles is directly related to the car’s handling. That makes setting up your car fairly simple.
If you do primarily highway driving, or go on a lot of long road trips, you’ll want to have a little bit of toe-in. That will help keep your car going straight by resisting steering input. That has the added benefit of making longer drives more comfortable because minor road variations won’t translate to the steering wheel.
The downside is that you are sacrificing some cornering capability because your car will be resisting steering input. That’s especially noticeable at lower speeds because it lowers your steering angle.
When you turn the steering wheel, there is a maximum amount of turning that can occur. That’s because there are some hard physical limitations. The steering arm only has so much room to move before, and the tires themselves only have so much space to turn back and forth.
The higher the steering angle, which is to say the more that the tires can turn, the better your car can take sharp corners at low speeds. Adjusting the wheels so that there is a little bit of toe-in reduces your steering angle. In essence, you are directly subtracting the toe-in angle from the steering angle because the wheel won’t be as turned when it hits the steering limits.
Cars are more stable and resist turning if you have a moderate amount of toe-in, so it follows that they have less turning resistance with some toe-out. Race cars and other vehicles that value performance over comfort will have some toe-out. That allows them to “snap” into a turn, and maximize turning angles.
Zegao Machinery Product Page
The downside is that a car with toe-out can be a bit twitchy. When you make a car easier to steer, any minor movement of the steering wheel gets translated directly into a change in tire direction. Most people move their hands around a lot as they drive. Their hands get tired, or they need to reach for a drink, or they are shifting gears and they have to take their hands off the wheel for a second. You will feel the car move in that moment you release the wheel.
Excessive toe will wear down a tire more quickly than a properly aligned vehicle will. There are two ways that a tire will lose tread because of toe-in or toe-out. The first is very similar to castor issues; you’ll notice feathering.
The second is that the inside or outside of the tire will be worn down more than the opposing side, similar to what happens when you have excessive camber.
Feathering can make a tire look like it has gills. When you look across the top of the tread, it should be even; all the tread blocks should be the same height. When a tire experiences excessive feathering, the tread will look jagged.
The biggest problem with feathering is that it can harm a tire’s ability to expel water. It’s certainly not the worst thing that can happen to a tire, but you will need to replace them sooner than a tire without feathering.
The inside of the tire is the side that is closest to the center of the car. If your car has excessive toe-out, the inside of the tire contacts the pavement before the rest of the tire, which causes it to wear out faster. Excessive inner-edge tread wear, especially on one side of your car but not the other, is a sure sign you need an alignment.
Toe-in has less effect on tread wear, although it may cause some outer-edge tread wear. It can be difficult to tell what issue you are having if you have some outer-edge tread wear since almost every alignment or tire issue causes the outside of a tire to wear down faster.
Your car’s service schedule will tell you when to check your alignment and what your factory toe angle is. Often, a commuter car will come from the factory with some toe-in. Most cars, however, will have a very neutral toe angle.
You may want to adjust your toe angle to a non-factory angle in order to bring out certain driving characteristics. Toe angle is adjusted in very small increments, so we encourage you to experiment with it a little. Add in some toe-in if you do a lot of highway driving, or give yourself a little toe-out for better handling. You might find you enjoy it a lot more than the factory settings.
Keeping your car’s wheels aligned is an important part of the driving experience. Bad alignment is bad for your wallet, and it can detract from the enjoyment of keeping your car on the road. Don’t suffer from poor handling. Get the toe adjusted to suit your needs and enjoy those road miles.
Why we don’t like box braces. There are so many reasons but I’ll try to narrow it to a few.
- The mounting of the boxes is not straight forward. Why not? Each box mounts to the frame in a slightly different position. The holes in the frame and the mounting bolts aren’t size on size. This allows for machining errors. It also allows for the box to be slightly higher or lower or at a slightly different angle. This causes interference with the sector shaft and the support bearing which creates a problem with the lash in the box on the gears. This leads to memory and dead spots. Sporadic steering, wander. You name it and the customer always blames the box for being crap or the ball joints.
-the nut that is supplied with the box braces. It’s machined with a shaft on the end to slide into the bearing. It’s impossible to machine something linear to something that is threaded. Unless its on the thread when its machined. This means the shaft doesn’t move perfectly on centre , which it needs to. It misaligns the shaft movement. That, in turn, pushes the shaft against the side of the bearing. Once again doing things like putting pressure on the gears in the steering box. It also leads to really stiff steering as the bearing wears. And you guessed it the customer will blame the box and the ball joints. The best part is someone will adjust the box thinking its loose (because they see the input shaft moving and not the sector shaft but they don’t know the bearing is binding and the torsion rod in the solenoid valve is just flexing)
-when people adjust the box lash, if the bearing is left on the box, it prevents the shaft from moving in or out. Which puts pressure on the adjustment screw and you guessed it they’ll blame the box for being worn out.
-the brace manufacturers don’t hold good tolerances. It’s pretty hard to stay within a few thousands of an inch when breaking and welding plate. It wouldn’t matter even if they could because as I said earlier every box mounts a little different. It can be compensated for with spacers at the bearing but not many people notice when the mount, the bearing and the sector shaft aren’t the right separation. Leading to force being put on the sector shaft.
-The mounting nut doesn’t allow for an easy torque check and hides loose pitman to sector shaft fits. It may be great when it leaves the shop but 3 months down a lot of gravel roads and those nuts back off allowing slop in the splines. Everything looks good but the arm is sandwiched against the sector shaft with the bearing and the mount not the nut. It leads to wander and death wobble. It also leads to the box being diagnosed as the issue by many people. Again, many times because the box gets tightened trying to solve the issue, the box gets over tightened and that leads to people thinking the box is loose.
I’m going to stop there. If you’d like I can keep going. I will say the brace should never change how the truck steers. Ever. It’s merely a shaft support. If the truck steers straighter its because the brace was mounted incorrectly and its binding against the box. Creating memory. Memory is great for going straight or in circles. However, more people bitch and whine about no return to centre.
Box braces, if mounted correctly and are maintained properly and the customer understands everything about them, can be beneficial, for anything that takes a beating off road. If it’s a customer that drives on the street tell him like my dad used to tell me “ quit dry steering idiot, you’re going to ruin the truck”
Ball joints are the critical component of the front suspension that connect various links and allow them to move. Ball joints consist of a ball and socket similar to the hip joint of the human body. Ball joints of your front suspension provide pivoting movement between the steering knuckles and control arms to provide a safe, smooth ride and allow you to precisely control your vehicle.
Ball joints consist of a metal housing and a stud that can swing and rotate within the housing. Bearings inside the housing are placed between the ball stud and housing to help reduce wear and friction. The socket is filled with grease to provide lubrication, keep debris and water out of the socket, and maintain noise free operation. A rubber boot, located at the opening of the joint, keeps debris out and grease in. Lastly, the assembly is closed with a method such as the MOOG® pressed-in cover plate.
Many original equipment ball joints are designed as sealed units. If the protective boot fails, water and road debris will quickly cause wear and ball joint failure. Some aftermarket ball joints use an improved greaseable design that allows lubrication to flush out contaminants to extend the life of the joints.
In your vehicle, you’ll find two different types of ball joints – upper ball joints and lower ball joints. While each of these ball joints serve different functions but both work together to keep steering reliable and responsive.
Designed to maintain alignment and absorb radial loads, such as turning forces, upper ball joints enable proper rotation of steering knuckle. Upper ball joints use a follower design.
Acting as a pivot point for the steering system, lower ball joints can either be load-carrying or follower types depending on the suspension design. Lower ball joints use a variety of designs: compression loaded, tension loaded and follower.
In a short long arm (SLA) suspension system, compression- and tension-loaded ball joints are load carrying ball joints that support the vehicle’s weight. These ball joints typically wear faster due to the additional stress on the socket. In MacPherson strut suspension systems, the lower ball joint is a follower design. Although they do not support the weight of the vehicle, they receive loading during cornering and braking.
When you need to replace a ball joint, MOOG has a ball joint for the repair. MOOG ball joints include technologies to increase strength and durability, extend service life and improve ease of installation. They restore like-new steering with application-specific features such as patented pressed-in cover plate and integral dust boot, instilling confidence with each install.
Learn more about premium steering and suspension parts, find your car part, or find where to buy your auto part today.
The content in this article is for informational purposes only. You should consult with a certified technician or mechanic if you have questions relating to any of the topics covered herein. Tenneco will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on any content.
Are you interested in learning more about ball joint manufacturer? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!