White95’s ‘23 F-150 “Abominable”

[white95]

Front end together but not torqued.

Lower ball joints fought back pretty hard but we prevailed. Four hours in. Started at 7:45 and stopped at 11:45.

Pausing to go rent a torque wrench and pick up a pizza. Will report back.

 

[white95]

Well guys, I was forced to raise the white flag. I will post up an explanation later but for right now, gonna lick my wounds and drink some beer.

 

[Daryl]

Mind if I join ya?!

And wait a tick…. “rent a torque wrench“ ?? You’re joking, right? There’s no way in this Earth YOU don’t have your own torque wrench.

 

[RAU03MACH]

Front end together but not torqued.

Lower ball joints fought back pretty hard but we prevailed. Four hours in. Started at 7:45 and stopped at 11:45.

Pausing to go rent a torque wrench and pick up a pizza. Will report back.

View attachment 33549

 

[white95]

The install started out well. Job was pretty straightforward;

Tear it apart.

Replace control arms.

Put it back together.




Tear down process.





Started replacing the control arms.



Began total reassembly.



Stopped at this point to get some red loctite, pizza and a bigger torque wrench. This was the beginning of the shit show.

 

[white95]

In order to install the lower control arms, you must use the supplied conical sleeve to fit the IHC ball joint into the Ford spindle.



What!? Ok, fine. When I had them in my hand to install, I realized where I screwed up buying used parts. The previous owner BEAT them out of the other truck. This apparently is a one-time use part and, had I know this, I would’ve replaced it along time ago.



Cleaned the cones (no pics) up the best we could and soldiered on. It appeared the sketchy portion would be below the tapered ball joint and inconsequential. Boy, was I wrong. The ball joints wouldn’t seat and this led to the nut stripping which wiped the ball joint threads out too.







We decided to drill through the nut and put a cotter pin in place.



Decided that it wasn’t worth risking my truck over a “this might work” and the call was made to return it to stock.



During the R&R process, it was discovered the driver side ball joint threads mushroomed and this effectively stopped me in my tracks. Didn’t have the proper file to dress the threads and I elected to start fresh in the morning.



He told me to take his Jeep home but I took the Corolla instead. It was rainy and peak traffic time. Didn’t see risking his Uber-pricy Jeep lol

 

[white95]

Certainly bummed out but I’ll get it sorted. Going to replace the busted parts in the IHC control arms and sell those stupid things. I’m going to order the KellTrac DA Viking coil overs to match the rear set I have.



Not playing games this round.

 

[96blak54]

Effin cars!

This reminds me .....something like this was always the outcome with my car lift. And what ever was on the lift stayed for a few nights while we figured out a solution to an otherwise very simple straight forward process. After many times like this with friends and my own stuff on the lift, I was convinced the lift was cursed!

I stopped using the lift and started using jack stands. After years of no use, a local friend wanted to buy the lift. I sold it at a great price along with my cursed theory. Now he has the lift and anything that gets lifted stays a few nights and has headache issues to an otherwise simple repair.

 

[Daryl]

Certainly bummed out but I’ll get it sorted. Going to replace the busted parts in the IHC control arms and sell those stupid things. I’m going to order the KellTrac DA Viking coil overs to match the rear set I have.

View attachment 33589

Not playing games this round.

Man, White95, that snowballed into a true and undeniable cluster-F*ck for sure. Feel bad for you. And even though we’ve all had similar happen, it seems it SHOULDN'T happen on a straight-forward R&R. Especially at your level of wrenching.
Shake it off best you can, reboot your noggin and restart like it’s the first go at a new project. Step by step (we all know) you’ll get there and the completion of this project will be all the sweeter! Have at it and we look forward to seeing pics

 

[white95]

Day 2:

Repair ball joint threads or replace control arm.

We shall see.

 

[joemomma]

Dang man that sucks. I thought I was the only one that shit like this happened to. Reminds me of the time we tried to lower my '89 Prelude by heating the springs. We used 2x4 to "control" the drop, but it ended up slamming it anyway. Which was totally fine by me honestly. Looked killer. However, upon test drive, had a horrible shimmy/vibration in the driveline under load. Something was off with the car, as simply lowering it shouldn't have caused those issues. It was bought used, clean title, but who knows the history of it before I got it with 80k on it.

You'll get it, shake it off.

 

[white95]

Reed insisted on me letting him take a crack at fixing the threads. It’s very close now.

 

[white95]

Took a moment to install my front differential brace since I have nothing better to do.

 

[white95]

Struck out on the repair. Replacing the control arm.

Ffs

 

[ElrodKTPQ_89]

edit: smartass fail; too dumb to post proper gif lol

 

[white95]

edit: smartass fail; too dumb to post proper gif lol

 

[white95]

Back to square one but without a sway bar. Had to sacrifice some hardware to the ball joint gods to get the f**ker home.

It’ll be ok, I will try again down the line a bit.

 

[ElrodKTPQ_89]

 

[white95]

Imma do the sensible thing and throw a bunch of cash at it.

 

[duh09]

Imma do the sensible thing and throw a bunch of cash at it.

That's a good story.