Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to replace my front shocks, upper control arms and ball joints, and lower ball joints.
I have to apologize, I fully intended to take some photos of
what I was doing, while I was doing it. But somewhere along the way I became
ultra greasy and my wife did not want me in the house until the job was
complete.
Plus, let’s be honest here, I did not really know what to
expect when I began and soon found out this was a job I could do, but it would
take some time.
In preparation to fix the front end of my pickup, I began
research online for the best parts and how to do what I wanted to do. I read
countless articles on how to replace ball joints and upper control arms. I
learned, or rather read, the ins and outs of ball joints and control arms, I
felt at the end of the experience, I was an expert.
That was until I began to actually take the pickup apart and
get to work.But I digress; I talked with anybody who would listen and many that didn’t even care about my project. I picked the brains of people at auto part stores.
Then, I began to gather my parts. I looked at probably more than 100 places to purchase parts online, and I made a dozen phone calls to local parts stores to determine what parts I wanted and where I was going to purchase them from.
I had made up my mind and the purchase was made. Now all I
had to do, was wait for the parts to arrive and install them.
As it turned out, waiting for the parts was the easy part. I
seemed to get a package a day for about a week and a half, with each box being
shipped from an online retailer containing only one part.Finally the parts were here and ready to be installed …