Interesting article about the control arm recall


2112

Blue/white 06'
Mark II Lifetime
Couldn’t the original bushing be drilled out? Or maybe carefully melted out so that the original mating surfaces could be left untouched?
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GT@50

GT Owner
Mark II Lifetime
Dec 14, 2019
852
Issaquah
Couldn’t the original bushing be drilled out? Or maybe carefully melted out so that the original mating surfaces could be left untouched?
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It's a steel sleeve with rubber and another inner sleeve unit that is pressed into the arm. Hole saw the rubber out, die grind a line in the outer sleeve, collapse it and it falls out. Debur the ID(not hone), freeze new bushing, heat arm to 212F, press in new sleeve to correct depth(use sleeve retainer Loctite). BJ end would be more difficult, score arm pressing out, and more likely to fail than the bushings unfortunately. Have these components ever had a failure NOT related to an accident?
If somebody makes new arms, use different BJ boot material. lol
What's the story on those? Why a different material than 90% of the cars on the road that don't have boot failure. There are some other Fords that use that material too.
 

sahlman

Ford GT Team Alumni
Jul 21, 2011
329
Verona, WI
Bushing housing is aluminum. Bar pin is aluminum

yes the ball joint removal is the bigger challenge

They weren’t a different material …far closer to big rotors than most others.
 

sahlman

Ford GT Team Alumni
Jul 21, 2011
329
Verona, WI
Bushing housing is aluminum. Bar pin is aluminum

yes the ball joint removal is the bigger challenge

They weren’t a different material …far closer to big rotors than most others.

Correction to above and @GT@50 is correct. The rear lower cross axis joint (at the lower balljoint location) and the outer toe link joint boots were both a different clear rubber. I believe we sourced those both from NMB instead of ZF Lemferder as we did for the rest. Unfortunately, that material was clearly not up to the task and time appears to be the biggest issue with those. We designed all with same specifications, but these did not do well.

In general, we don't have much for testing of a car sitting a lot so these passed all of the functional tests...which includes accelerated tests for cycles and time so this is a part that passed on the very short program. Time got us on this one.