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Sorry for the re-thread...posted under the wrong forum :$

Hey I'm new to the forum but have used it for information so thought I'd add some info from my own experiences.

The other weekend, I was fortunate enough to find myself tracing down the death wobble in my 92 laredo. I had done the tie rod ends with the drag link stuff in the fall and got new treads in the early spring that had it running straight and true for a bit but the dw came back with a vengeance so working from front to back, I thought the next items I should replace were ball joints (it ended up being a loose track bar mount at the frame side btw).

So ya, with my car being crippled and not able to go above 20mph on the highway, I had no choice but to hit up the local autozone on my ride home from work. I got the overpriced parts (high 60s a piece) I needed for the upper and lowers on both sides and emptied my weekend schedule to tackle the apparent issue. I had never done the job and I bought the xj 4 years ago with 220k miles on it so I wanted to leave myself a good amount of time. They even "rented" me a nice puller/ installer that came with a variety of adapters that proved useful. They did require a full price deposit of around a $200 for the set until returned but it had all the necessary pieces to make that part of the job easy.

The passenger side took time but went back together with no issues. The driver side upper went it easy enough too but the lower I noticed that the part was different than the other and that the dust boot was fixed to the bearing and that the outer flange that is nice to place the press fitting/ adapter on was far slimmer than the other installed one. I attempted to install it anyway with a little nudge and tore the boot immediately. ****. I looked at the box and the part numbers matched. Being their duralast brand, they were both FA1633. I did notice the boxes were different sizes and upon closer inspection saw that one was made in china and the other in canada. The one one with the issues was made in china. The uppers were chinese made but they both went in fine. They look like the online picture on the autozone website with the darker steel color and the surfaces that are in contact with the spindle? having grooves in them to resist rotation in the socket maybe? who knows.... They also have grease fittings. Both lowers do not but the canadian j has the normal metallic color without any grooves on the contact surface. The dust boot comes off and they provide a nice size flange/ shoulder where the press adapter fits nicely and the j slips right in without issue.

So yeah, maybe there is a technique for inserting the "booted" chinese ball joint but I'm a fair weather weekend mechanic so it caused me some curse words but autozone reimbursed me for the slightly damaged chinese part and I managed to track down another canadian made lower at the next closest AZ since I knew they went in nicely as well as it kept with the symmetry of the car which is always a plus in my book.

So just a heads up to the XJers tracking down that DW. I'd say don't do like I did, and check out the track bar and it's mounts first, as well as look out for those chinese duralast bj's if that's the road travelled.

cheers,
A

BlueRidgeMark

Please, paragraphs were invented for a reason. Break it up into something readable.

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BlueRidgeMark