Bottom ball joint replacement

[mjb]

I made a mess of the ball joints when separating my suspension for the clutch change, and they're not too expensive to replace from eurocarparts.

Question is how do you remove the old ones? From the picture, it looks like the whole thing "just" screws into the hub carrier, but with 10 years of wear I doubt it'll "just" be a case of unscrewing it...

How bad will the car be with a pair of knackered joints? Will smashing up the bottom ends and the gaiters actually have that much, if any, effect?

[jasper5]

The ball joints looked alright to me, the gaiters are damaged, new gaiters would solve the problem, failing that, you have to unscrew the ball joint out of the carrier to replace them....if you can't unscrew them as they are, remove the whole hub unit, there's only that one bolt and the bracket I showed you holding it on.

[bangernom1cs]

HI,
I've had to cope with more of these than I can remember.
Its not worth playing about with so just get a complete joint as its a reasonably involved big job.
Late 405's had the same balljoint as a 406 incidentally.

I'm planning to do my own on the 'new car' shortly as I suspect like most of the items on it, are the original factory fitment.
There's a special tool which has 'slots' added to fit over the balljoint for ease of removal/fitment.
I have access to this and will do a photo shoot when it happens.
BE WARNED however, as the joint can be very tight and in some cases..seize in almost completely.
At one time on the last D8 we had to remove the entire hub, and couldn't move it even with an air chisel.
A quick trip to the local garage who had oxy-acetylene to heat the hub was the only solution, and even then it was tight and still reqired the air chisel on it. Had it not moved then an entire hub would have been needed.
But it eventually it did shift but took ages to cool off! It subsequently stuck again a few later but wasnt such an effort.
As a matter of course I suggest you buy the best quality joint you can get (Peugeot ones can be expensive however)
and ALWAYS grease up the threads with copper grease before fitting the new joint. You stake it in so it wont ease off or anything but does make life a lot easier shold you need to do it again like I have to consider.

Tony

[mjb]

Sod that then

I have absolute confidence that my car will be worse than that. Unless I prepare for the worst of course, in which case it'll be easy as pie