Good morning everyone and welcome to another weekend. This time it's Easter and April is indeed living up to it's adage of showers preparing to bring the May flowers. This is great because CA is dry AF and we'll take every little bit we can get. Hopefully this also means there's snow piling up in the high country because the snow pack is only like a third of normal last time I saw. So bring the rain, I say.
The only down side to this is that I had planned on starting the front end rebuild on my truck this weekend. I drive an '01 Dodge Dakota RT and it's a got a 360 V8 so the front end is a little heavier than the vehicle is really built for. A few months back I noticed my front tires really wearing improperly and it was starting to pull pretty hard to the right. After I took a look I noticed that the lower control arm bushings were needing some care and that the boots on the lower ball joints were looking cracked and worn. I started acquiring parts beginning with upper and lower ball joints. If those fail your wheels will essentially fall off, so that's no bueno. Then I figured I may as well do front shocks if I'm going to have things apart already and I started looking at good polyurethane control arm bushings but held off for the time being. After some time I noticed that the right side lower control arm itself actually had a couple of places that were completely worn though where the bushings had failed and the metal shell was contacting metal to metal. This explained the hard right pull and some of the tire wear. So ultimately I just decided to buy lower control arms for both sides. They come with bushings and ball joints installed, so I'll have a couple of extra ball joints since I had already picked up a set, but that's okay. Then I decided that I may as well also pick up some new outer tie rod ends because they're probably taking extra wear with the control arms clunking around. I am not going to get upper control arm bushings yet. I may come to regret this decision but I've dumped something like $800 into the parts plus two new tires already. Speaking of tires, the current ones have been on for nine years and I'll be rotating the still good rear tires to the front and putting the new ones on the back. My truck is two wheel drive so it won't be hurting a transfer case and the deeper tread always goes on the back when you're doing two tires. That helps avoid over steer from the front end having higher traction. I'll keep an eye on the wear after replacing front end parts and if it all looks good then I'll match the two new tires with two more in a few weeks. After that I'll have get a new radiator because I found a hairline crack in the current one and with summer coming I just don't need to blow it up and be forced to get a new one at a potentially inconvenient time. Anyway, new control arms, bushings, upper and lower ball joints, shocks and tie rod ends plus two new tires for now. Once aligned that ought to make it drive a ton better. This rain has to stop first though because I don't have a covered space outside to work with, and frankly it's pretty miserable to work on cars in the rain anyway. Can't keep your hands warm. Read more
