01 explorer suspension diagnosis

Thanks for the reply. I am the only driver and mostly only drive it to and from work which is about 3 miles from my house. We mostly use the van on weekends unless something weird comes up. I definitly haven’t hit any curbs/medians on the road but sometimes I do take a gravel back road home and it is possible I could have hit a pothole too fast and bent a tie rod I suppose, although I didn’t notice any obvious bends in them when I was looking.

I do need to replace shocks and sway bar end links/bushings but no suspension parts have been replaced yet (I was planning to save up and buy shocks for front & back as well as the links all at once but it seems like busted radiator hoses on the van & random stuff around the house keeps delaying that as I figure cushy shocks on a 15yr old 130k vehicle to be a bit of a luxury compared to some other things).

Is it possible that bad shocks could be causing the camber bolts on the upper control arm to vibrate out of alignment? I know that seems far fetched which is why I didn’t go there earlier but it is seeming that you and others agree that those ball joints look fine so just throwing that out there. College Man suggested going to an alignment shop to see what they say, do you think I am better off waiting until I replace at least the end links and maybe the shocks before doing that, or are they not critical to an alignment?

Thanks! I will look into getting parts ASAP and working on it this weekend. Definitly probably have things hitting harder than normal due to shocks, ride is super bumpy on the gravel road, just didn’t know since things aren’t dampened like they should be if the excessive movement in the other components could be vibrating things more than normal causing those bolts to turn.

Thanks again for the quick replies and advice.

[quote=”college man” post=175418]Keep us posted on how things go.[/quote]

I took my truck to a local tire shop. They confirmed that the passenger side camber is off at -2.1 and toe was fine. From what I found (-1.2) is about max variation from a (-0.5) preferred. They said with it being this far off that definitly suggest that something is broken and that they saw a “little” play in the ball joint. The guy at desk said usually it’s the lower ball joint that goes bad but wouldn’t confirm with the techs in the shop, just kept saying “we are a tire shop and do alignments, you need to get it looked at by a mechanic” I did notice that gap between ball joint and spindle, so maybe it is the lower joint?

ANOTHER THING OF NOTE: they said the camber adjustment on the control arm was frozen so they couldn’t even attempt to align it even if everything had been OK.

So new questions:
1. How high do you need to jack up the control arm in order to find play in the ball joints since I wasn’t before (it still lifts the whole truck a bit even doing it under the arm, so how do I know when it’s unloaded from the torsion bar?) – or should I just take the knuckle off and see which one is sloppy?

2. Is there a way to get the camber plates unseized without replacing the whole control arm? I asked them about soaking it in penetrating fluid and he looked at me like i was a dumbass and said, no they are seized up.

I might take it to my local CarX as they do free alignment checks as well as mechanical work so they may be more likely to tell me which parts are bad. however last time I went in there with my old car to get brakes checked they wanted to sell me calipers, lines, rotors, and everything when another shop just said pads (one of the reasons I’m trying to do more work myself!) – they may want to give me a whole new front end!

I was getting errors trying to attach photos of the forms, so here is a link instead: https://goo.gl/photos/p4wmUedUnkjKwoPW8

Yeah, definitly they can’t force me to do the work there, just meant I still may not have it narrowed down if they say everything is bad. I will take a look at that link and get back to you when I have more info.