I have a friend, I guy I know from my erstwhile professional life—detection of unexploded ordnance on formerly-used military training ranges; long story—who is a Chevy guy with a ’68 Camaro RS/SS. He lives down near Virginia Beach and is active in the vintage Chevy scene down there, helping to organize shows and cruise nights.
For years, he’s been trying to get me to come down to speak at an event. This year, he was one of the organizers of the Coastal Virginia Car Show, and when he offered me a speaking slot, I accepted. I thought I’d road-trip down in my ’73 3.0CSi, which hasn’t seen many miles since the Great Drenching Event of 2013 (the near-aquatic levels of water the car experienced on its last trip down to the Vintage).
The show was scheduled for the weekend before Thanksgiving, so at a time when most folks are bedding down their pampered classics and putting them away for their winter slumber, I was pulling my lightly-used but well-sorted E9 out of storage and giving it a quick once-over.
I’ve written repeatedly about the Big Six—things that are likely to cause you to go from living the dream to calling a flatbed (fuel delivery, cooling system, ignition, charging, belts, and ball joints). Even on a well-sorted car, giving each of those a quick check before a long trip is time well spent. I put the E9 on the lift and inspected and squeezed all the fuel and cooling-system hoses. I was alarmed to see some dampness at the bottom of the radiator, but it went away when I tightened the clamp on the lower radiator hose, and did not return.
But I was in for a surprise when I checked the ball joints. The boot on the right ball joint was ripped.
Ball joints may seem, to many, to be a forced fit into the Big Six, but they are at the nexus of a car’s steering and suspension. The suspension can get soft, the tie rods can get worn and induce play in the steering, but ball joints take all the pounding from potholes, and if they fail, you lose control of the car. Google “ball joint failure” to get some religion.
I’ve found that, in general, ball joints on ’70s-era BMWs are remarkably long-lived—as long as the boots are intact. But when the boot gets ripped, grease leaks out, and moisture and dirt get in, contaminating the ball joint, leading to play and eventual potential failure.
This is to be avoided at all costs.
I checked the ball joint by squeezing on it with a big pair of slip-joint piers and didn’t feel any play. Still, the idea of ignoring my own advice and pounding out 1,200 miles didn’t sit well with me.
The first step in this sort of situation is often to find out what your options are. On an E9 or a Bavaria, the ball joint is integral with the lower control arm—and those, it turns out, have been unavailable from BMW for many years. There is an aftermarket supplier, Ocap, who sells reasonably-priced lower control arms with integrated ball joints, but when I read the forums and talked with pros, I learned that these were often derisively referred to as “Ocrap.” That’s not to say that you should never buy them—they’re sold by several reputable Roundel advertisers—but the idea of yanking out a lower control arm when the only thing wrong with it is a split in the ball-joint boot gave me pause.
It was then that Mario Langston, owner of VSR1 Racing in Bow, New Hampshire, chimed in. “It is very common on the E9 for these rubber boots to tear and fail and the ball joint to still be good,” he said. “The kluge fix is to go to Autozone and buy a generic polyurethane ball-joint boot, about six bucks apiece, disassemble, clean out the old grease, pack in new grease, push the new boot on top, and reassemble. As you know, the hardest part of this job will be loosening the ball joint nut inside the turning plate.”
Someone else on Facebook then turned me onto the Prothane kit on Amazon (part number 19-1715BL), containing two ball-joint boots and two tie-rod boots. About $14 and two-day shipping later, it was at my door.
While I waited for it to arrive, I began disassembling the ball joint. As Mario had noted, the problem is that in order to slide the new boot over the ball joint’s tapered shaft, you have to do nearly as much work as you’d need to do to remove and replace the ball joint, which in this case means replacing the lower control arm. You first need to cut the safety wire and undo the three 17-mm nuts holding the turning plate to the bottom of the strut; that exposes the nut at the top of the ball joint’s tapered shaft.
With the turning plate unbolted, I found that there was just enough clearance to be able to pull out the cotter pin and zip off the castle nut with an impact wrench.
The next step was to separate the ball joint from the turning plate.
As with any ball joint or tie rod, there is a tapered rod pulled through a hole by a nut that’s torqued to spec. Even under ideal circumstances, it doesn’t come out without a fight, and obviously this is amplified when it’s been in there since the Nixon administration. To get it out, you need a ball joint separator—a tool that cups around the space between the ball joint and the turning plate while levering downward on the tapered rod. When the tapered rod frees itself, it typically does so with a very loud BANG!
If you don’t care about the condition of the ball joint, you can try separating it by inserting a pickle fork—that’s what it’s called in the shop, but it would spear very large pickles indeed—in the gap between the ball joint and the turning plate and hammering on it, but this typically creates play in the joint-and-socket arrangement, and my intent was to re-use mine, not destroy it. A genuine ball-joint separator is a much better, less destructive, far-preferred tool. Plus, the older I get, the less comfortable I am with hitting parts of my steering linkage with a hammer, even if I am planning on replacing that part, as the shock travels through the entire steering system. Tools like ball-joint and tie-rod separators are inexpensive these days; twenty buck will buy you one on Amazon.
I soaked the place where the tapered rod goes through the hole in Silikroil and heated it up with a MAPP-gas torch, then reached for my ball-joint separator. Unfortunately, the one I have appeared to be 2002-sized, not E9-sized, and despite repeated attempts, I couldn’t get the separator to robustly wrap around the gap in the joint and push down on the tapered rod without hitting and sliding off. I taped a nut in place to act as a spacer, which let the jaws of the separator get a better angle on the top of the tapered rod, but the tool still kept sliding off.
In order to improve clearance and get a better shot at separating the ball joint, I needed to swing the whole assembly downward.
In my case, that required undoing the sway-bar link and the big bolt through the main subframe bushing—at which point you might as well just replace the whole lower control arm. But even with the added clearance, I still couldn’t get the ball joint separated.
This was one of those times when Autozone’s free tool-rental program saved me. They had a ball-joint separator that was exactly the right size. One hour, a $30 refundable charge on my credit card, and a loud bang later, and the ball joint was free.
The original ball-joint boot isn’t like a boot on a newer replacement ball joint or tie rod, where there’s a springy circular clip holding it in place. Instead, it appears to be permanently crimped around the upper base of the joint. The replacement Prothane boot has no circular clip, either—which is fine, because there’s really no ridge for it to snap onto. Instead, the base of the Prothane boot sort of sits around the outside of the upper base of the ball joint. So the Prothane solution isn’t as good as an original correctly-fitted boot. However, there’s no question that it’s way better than a ripped boot that’s yawning open.
I took a single-edged razor blade and cut away the upper part of the original boot, leaving some of its base in place. I then took Mario’s advice, cleaned as much of the old grease and dirt out as I could, packed new grease into both the joint and the new boot, and slipped the new boot over the tapered shaft. I then slid the tapered shaft through the turning plate, torqued down the castellated nut, replaced the cotter pin, and re-attached the turning plate onto the bottom of the strut.
But when it was all assembled and the car was down off the lift and everything went into its resting position with weight on it, I saw that the angle that the control arm and ball joint made with the bottom of the strut caused one end of the boot to fold over like a pull-on wool hat.
I looked at it, thought about it, took the single-edged blade, and carefully made a relief cut on both sides that allowed the boot to unfold and wrap around the base of the joint better.
The 1,200-mile round trip to Virginia Beach in the E9 was delightful drive, the only problem being an out-of-balance left front wheel that I had re-balanced when I arrived. The car looked right at home on the floor of the Virginia Beach Convention center among the muscle cars, and generated a lot of attention, admiring glances, and questions.
Upon my return, I re-checked the boot, and it doesn’t look like anything has moved. I’ll keep an eye out for other solutions for the lower control arm and ball joint. But at least I wasn’t worried about it during the drive. And, as we all know, half of maintenance is for the car; the other half is for you, making it so you don’t need to obsess and worry whether something will fail.—Rob Siegel
Rob’s new book, Ran When Parked: How I Resurrected a Decade-Dead 1972 BMW 2002tii and Road-Tripped it a Thousand Miles Back Home, and How You Can, Too, is now available on Amazon. Or you can order personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.
