I worked on the car some last night. Took me two hours to do the left rear ball joint. Took me 30 mins to get the control arm off. I got a tool to press the stud out of the hub, but there's not a whole lot of room to work with when the axle and everything else is still attached. I wound up unbolting the control arm from the rear sub-frame and then the tool could fit to press out the ball joint stud. The stud did not want to come out and I had to whack the control arm a couple times while the tool was pressing on the stud to get it to pop out.

I then had to figure out how to use the damn ball joint press. The instructions that come with it are lacking. 20 mins later and I had the parts in the right order to press out the ball joint. It actually pressed out pretty easily. It was definitely due for a change as I could move the stud around just by grabbing it with two fingers. Reversed things and pressed the new one in. The Sentra ball joint works just fine. Felt a little tighter pressing in, but I figure that's not a bad thing. I think spent 10 mins dorking with the ball joint boot cause the instructions say you should press it on till it touches the circlip, but the there was no way in hell that it was going to go on that far.

Then I had to put the control arm back on. Sounds simple.....unless you have a spherical bearing setup like mine on the mounting points to the subframe. The mounting points each are about 2in long. What Bob did was put a spherical bearing in the center of each mounting "tube" on the control arm. This leaves about a 1/2 gap on either side of the bearing that needs to be filled in to mimic the original metal sleeve that keeps the bolt from squishing things. So there is a metal spacer that fits on either side of the bearing. These of course are not connected to anything and just fall out. They are round and tend to roll everywhere. Needless to say I spent much time trying to hold the spacers in while I bolted up the control arm and then hunting around for them when they fell out and rolled away. Probably took me 45 mins to get the damn control arm attached and it's still not torqued down.

I figure I can do the other side in maybe an hour. We'll see.

I'm going to try and take some pics of the spherical bearing setup on the control arm when I do the other side. It just seems like there's got to be a better of doing it.

The adventure continues tonight.

David