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• Troubleshooting
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Ford Crown Victoria / Mercury
Grand Marquis Lower Ball Joint /
Control Arm Replacement

Troubeshooting

1. Unable to remove ball joint from bottom of spindle:
• These dudes are sometime quite hard to remove especially if they have been in place for many years. You can soak the shaft overnight with a thread release solvent (e.g., Liquid Wrench, etc.) to help loosen them. You can also try using an impact wrench with a pickle fork attachment if you have one. The best advice is to use good, correclty sized pickle forks and don't be shy with the hammer. You may need to hit them hard and several times to break these bad-boys loose. Also, if you pickle fork is too small and provides too small a wedge you won't be able to get enough "wedge" force on the ball joint to break it loose. You can double-up 2 pickle forks (using one as a stationary wedge) to increase the span of the wedge but you also increase the chance you are going to hit yourself with a very heavy hammer.
  
  
2. Unable to re-install the lower control arm:
• As we mentioned in the repair, you will probably need to "expand" the lower control arm mounting tabs in order to get the new control arms to slide in. You may also need to use a rubber mallet or large-face hammer to get the lower control arms to slide in and to postion them so you can re-install the mounting bolts.
  
  
3. I can't find the grease fittings:
• As mentioned in the repair instructions, some replacement ball joints don't have provisions for a grease fitting and are "permanently" lubed. If you bought Ford / OEM parts this is probably the case. Although the vast majority of after-market suspension parts have grease fittings our replacement parts didn't. If yours don't have grease fittings you can skip this step.