i did a little experiment and here is my results ..... on my 74 lesabre convertible i needed to change the lower ball joints, shocks and springs....i left the lower control, arms on the car and did all of this laying in my driveway. i did the drivers side ball joint pretty straight forward. supported the car by its frame, supported the lower control arm by a floor jack, seperated the ball joint from the spindle, etc... anyway .. i used a C-clamp press to press the old ball joint out. the press didnt work exactly as it was supposed to because the clamp didnt open far enought for all the adapters. the screw on the C-clamp instead had "butt" up to the stud on the old ball joint. as i tightened the clamp, the stud would try to walk off. so i would stop and take a 2 pound sledge hammer and lightly tap the stud back to center. took at least 5 times of doing this before the ball joint was pressed out. the press pressed the new ball joint in as planned but took awhole lot of muscle to get it completely seated..... SO ON THE SECOND BALL JOINT HERE IS WHAT I DID DIFFERENT. i took my trusty 4 inch grinder (with a cut off wheel on it) and very squarely, cut off the threaded part of the stud on the old ball joint. this seemd to make placing the C-clamp on the whole works much easier. ... i was able to use the press more like the instructions showed. putting the new ball joint in went much easier and here is how i did it. i had put in my freezer the day before. so after about 24 hours in there the cold shrunk the metal oh so slightly. it pressed into the lower control arm hole using about 25 percent of the effort that the first one did. hopefully this may help someone. rotsa ruk!!
My dad was a mechanic all his life and we used this idea a lot of times. He would even heat up the control arm till it got almost red then put the ball joint that was frozen overnight. This made the installment a heck of alot simpler.Works well with control arm bushings too. Pat:TU:
