Ball joint broke

[monotonorobo]

Yeah I just pulled it out again and checked I ended up cross threading the nut plate and the bolt. I think I’m gonna go to the junkyard and pull all of them off from the GM there

[monotonorobo]

Does the 1990 town car have the same bolts and plate as the 89 GM?

[sly]

Yes. up to 94 used the same bolts and plate nuts.

[monotonorobo]

Ok, I’ll go to the JY as a last resort. I tried repairing the threads but it didn’t really work out. I’ve also noticed that the nut on the plate on the other side can spin freely, don’t know if that was intentional or not but the one that stripped does not spin freely. I’m gonna try again but could i just use something similar to this plate instead? I was gonna cut a decent sized piece of steel and drill a hole wide enough for the bolt to go through with a nut and washer on the bottom.

[sly]

It could also be that all the ones I've dealt with are crudded up and not clean while yours spin freely. This could be fine. As long as you can tighten them and they don't come loose. If the nut came off easy, the free spinning is probably correct. But yeah, you can build your own caged nut as well. I don't see any issue with that. Just make sure it's grade 8 or better.

[monotonorobo]

Yeah I was gonna grab grade 8. I’m gonna keep looking around for a bit before I do cut me a piece of steel. If I can find a nut with a large enough flared end to cover some of that space then i won’t worry about the plate

[sly]

The only thing the plate is for is to not require a wrench on the nut.

[monotonorobo]

I ended up taking out all 4 of the original control arm to frame bolts and replaced them with 19mm / 3/4 bolts. it seems like after you take them out they bulge and won’t go back in. I’m checking both sides before I put everything back together, is this gap alright for the uppers? It’s really small and I used a 1/4” to put it in there.

[sly]

As long as the bolts holding the ball joint on are tight, that's fine. You may want to check on them after a couple of weeks and months to make sure they don't need to be snugged up after settling in.

[monotonorobo]

Ok. I tried to torque it down with my 3/8 torque wrench and I guess it’s out of calibration because I snapped two bolts on it when I tried to go to 25ft lbs. I’ll just go with my feeling of when it’s tight enough and check later like you mentioned

[sly]

Those small bolts on the ball joint probably don't need more than 100 in-lbs (about 8-9 foot pounds) and yeah... enough to get things snugged up good is enough there. That joint doesn't really have a lot of force on it unless the suspension is at full droop and the bump stops are still good. The shock will take most of the strain of stopping the spring anyhow.

[monotonorobo]

Yeah I had assumed that it wouldn’t take that much since most of the force would be on the spring and like you said the bump stops. I did 25 ft lbs because they were grade 8’s so I was going off of this chart