It Writes Itself
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Above is a picture that says, more than anything else tonight, how my efforts to fix my truck are going.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
A couple of weeks ago, I took my truck in to get the alignment checked and taken care of. I purchased the “Lifetime Alignment” for it a couple of years ago, which I like to take advantage of fairly frequently. This last time, however, my mechanic told me something rather troubling - due to some serious issues with some of the hardware, they weren’t able to align it this time around. They wanted to replace the upper and lower ball joints, a tie rod end, the Pitman arm, and the idler arm. They also wanted to charge $800 for this laundry list.
I thanked them for bringing this list of problems to my attention, then mentally flipped them the bird. I also hit up RockAuto and got the parts I needed to do the job myself. Total tally: $170. So far, so good. About a week later, since I cheaped out on shipping, I received the parts that I needed and a couple of extras - why replace one tie rod end, after all, when you can replace both of them? And, why not replace the tie rod adjustment sleeve while I’m at it? They’re right there!
And thus, it began…
In fairly short order, I realized I was going to need some tools. For starters, I needed a ball joint press. Since I figured I would be doing this sort of thing roughly once, maybe twice in my lifetime, I figured I’d go cheap - the tools didn’t have to last forever, after all. They just needed to last long enough for me to replace a few ball joints in my truck. No big deal, right? So, I went to the Harbor Freight here in Reno and went shopping.
On the off chance that some of my readers might have no idea what a Harbor Freight is, it’s probably best to describe it via simile: Harbor Freight is to tools what Walmart is to clothes. Harbor Freight sells very inexpensive tools, which, at least on paper, sounds like the perfect place to go when you’re just a sporadic home mechanic. You don’t go to Harbor Freight for tools that your livelihood depends on, of course, but, at least for me, tools are a cost center, not a profit center, so anything that minimizes that cost sounds like a perfectly brilliant idea. So, I got myself a ball joint press, a pickle fork, and the pictured Pitman arm puller.
I still have the pickle fork. It’s a little bent and dented, but it still works. That’s one for three.
During use of the ball joint press, the C-clamp bent. Keep in mind that, in a ball joint press, the C-clamp is basically a gigantic, twenty pound C-shaped piece of solid metal. The trouble, of course, is the “metal” part - see, most tools are made out of steel. Not Harbor Freight tools, though - no, they use a little thing called “ductile iron“. Now, why somebody would make something that needs to hold its shape under extreme pressure out of a substance whose sole redeeming quality is that it bends easily, well, I can only guess, and my guess would involve lots and lots of Yuan and Renminbi. Or, to put it another way, it’s all about the BenjaMaos.
So, I returned the ball joint press and used AutoZone’s loan-a-tool program to get a better one for a day or two. It turned out to be cheaper than getting my own, anyways. Thus, after two days, my coworker and mechanically minded friend (who shall be referred to as “D-Prime” from here on out) and I successfully changed the ball joints in the truck.
So far so good, right? Well…
The tie rods were easy enough to contend with using the tools we had - the pickle fork dealt with them appropriately. There was still the idler arm and the Pitman arm to contend with, however, and all the pickle fork pounding in the world wasn’t going to remove those things. Anticipating this, I picked up the pictured Pitman Arm puller at Harbor Freight while I was over there returning the ball joint press, thus proving that, no, I most certainly do not learn from my mistakes if it can at all be helped.
Today, I used the Pitman Arm puller. The Pitman Arm, I’m sad to say, is still attached to the truck, firmly stuck to the steering gear, taunting me, laughing at me. It has successfully proved, beyond a shadow of any doubt, the folly of using ductile iron tools against quality Chrysler Engineering.
(Coincidentally - Dodge Dakotas are easy to work on, assuming you don’t get tools that are cheaper than the truck. Fortunately, you have to get some really cheap tools to pull that off…)
The task for tomorrow? Buy a Pitman Arm puller from someone that can actually import tools from the post-Cultural Revolution part of China. Remove the Pitman Arm. Then, use that tie rod remover pictured next to it to deal with the idler arm. That one I’m not concerned about - I know the tie rod remover works well enough to dislodge that sucker from the tie rod. No worries there.
With that, here’s another, equally crumulent picture of the cheaply made Pitman Arm “puller”:
rants | David Colborne | 
August 12, 2008 11:33 pm
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