Been replacing all 4 control arms on the 96 XJ and to my amazement everything has gone well so far. Replaced the bottom 2 ok, and the driver side upper went in w/o too much trouble...so but now I'm into the upper arm on the passenger side. Pressing the bushing in on the driver side went ok as it goes into a cast iron part of the axle, but the pass side bushing mount isn't nearly as solid and I'm wondering how this one's gonna go. Basically I'm looking at pressing bushing through two circles of metal with not much support metal in between. And as much force as it's gonna take I would think those two metal surfaces would end up collapsing toward each other as the C-clamp + bushing setup is tightened.

If I had the right size pipe and a MIG I'd insert a small section of pipe between the circles to make sure I didn't fold things up.

I've rented a big C-clamp ball joint 'maintenance kit' w/ a lot of different sized cups from a car store for the job. Any tips/tricks/advice on how to get this particular side done?

 

I just finished replacing the control arms on our '01 Limited. I used a couple of wood blocks to support the two legs or arms. We set up the press so that it was tight against the bushing. I then placed the blocks between the sides of the bushing mount and proceeded to press the bushing into place. It is about an inch of space between the two sides. I didn't think of it then, maybe a socket would provide support.

 

Right, just anything shoved in there while the compression is going on will do. Doesn't need to be something as permanent as my idea.

I ended up having to cut the bolt to the same pass UCA axle side bushing, and I'm concerned about clearance issues replacing it with a regular six-sided bolt. Did Jeep make the OEM bolt with that funny type of flag head because of clearance issues say when if the arm were to get pushed way up during heavy suspension compression?

 

I replaced the original bolts on the front of the UCAs with a 10mm x 1.50 x 70 mm hex head flanged bolt. They are 5 mm shorter than originals. That was the longest bolt the local hardware store had.
I didn't think about clearance issues.