With everything thats been going on at our place (new baby expected next couple weeks), house renos, and going bat-crap crazy at work, I've been letting things go way longer on my Pathy than I would have ever imagined I could a few years ago. But such is life...
On the way to the city today, I noticed that the truck was reacting differently when hitting bumps, and even wandering some when on the highway. Also, at low speed there was definitely a noise when hitting certain bumps.
When we got home, I did the standard test of yanking on the tires at 12 and 6, as well as at 3 and 9. The 3 and 9 test yielded some play on my passenger side front tire. Jacked up the truck, removed the tire, and confirmed that the outer tie rod joint had significant play in it.
$60 later (frickin ripoff Canadian parts stores) and about 2hrs later, I had a brand new outer joint in my hands. In the mean time, I had loosened off the inner rod by using a 15/16" on the jam nut, and a 7/8" wrench on the inner rod, and managed to get the inner rod to start spinning, at which point I used a 22mm socket with my impact driver to remove the main nut. I then used a ball joint fork to pop the ball joint out of the race on the spindle. Once removed, I could put a 17mm wrench on the outer tie rod to spin it off of the inner rod shafts.
Keys here are to prevent any spinning of the jam nut, or inner rod. This way when you spin the new outer rod on, your alignment hasn't been changed at all.
Spun the new rod on, and slapped it all back together, and we are good to go. The new joint came with a nylon locking nut instead of a castle nut with Cotter pin, so I ended up double nutting the nyloc nut as I have had bad experiences with nyloc nuts before.
Note that the manual states torque of the main nut is 63 ft-lbs. Once you get to 50 or so, it takes a bunch more turns as the ball joint is seating in the race. I kept spinning until I got to about 65ish ft-lbs. After that I did one more round for good measure.
Anyways that's what I spent my Saturday on. Yay for me!
t
