How Difficult is it to Replace the Rear Control Arm Bushings
Recently, my Trouble-Never-End Jeep Grand Cherokee (2002) has been loosing stability especially when making turns where its appears to be swaying sideways. Diagnostics show that the bushings in the real upper control arms are dead although the one in the ball joint is still fine. How hard is is it too replace these bushings or the whole upper control arm? Bushings cost less than 20 bucks while the whole arm cost more than 90 bucks, and the shop wants to charge me about 350 bucks. Is it reasonable to DIY and change the bushings only or change the whole arm. I feel greater pain to pay 350 bucks for someone to fix my old car.
Any DIY ideas pleadse?
I am looking for youtube videos on how to release the ball-joint. Any ideas?
Eventually I bought the whole unit from ebay for 89 bucks; it came with the ball joint. To remove the old unit was really messy. Youtube videos suggest that you remove the whole wheel and its suspension which is a project by itself, so I decided not to go that route. I left both wheel and suspension in place, and I easily unscrewed the two 10-mm and the two 13-mm support bolts for the fuel and brake lines using ring wrenches, and then I easily removed the next two 15 mm support blots from the bushing also using using a wring wrench. The problem was the on removing the three 13/16-inch in bolts that hold the ball joint on the differential. After several gallons of beer and sweat, I got two of them out but the last one on left won't listen. Space is so tight that there is no room for any pneumatic wrench. I wanted to remove the whole A-arm and its ball joint as one unit, but it is getting so notorious.
Fixed it. Eventually got the notorious bolt out and the old unit came out very easily. Mounting the new was straightforward- no sweat, only a few pints of beer !
There was some rust on the old ball joint and the old bushings, but since I did not want to temper with those parts, things went just fine by replacing the whole unit. Here is a picture of the old one that I removed
In fact it wasn't noisy, at least it never kicked into my noise annoyance meter. The main problem was lack of stability when negotiating turns. Each time you make it turn, the vehicle feels as if it is gonna fly off, so always I had to super slow on making turns, which made anyone behind me curse like hell!! And when you drive on a windy day, the vehicle feels as if it doesn't want to stay the course unless you super slow her.
