Introduction
When people are looking to buy these cars, you’ll often see that the clutch is a big deal.
The clutch is what you gotta look out for, It’s expensive and so on.
And honestly, it really isn’t that much of a problem, The clutch itself isn’t that expensive. It’s quite labor intensive, so you’re mostly paying for an hourly rate. If you’re a diyer, it’s accessible. I have a video of it, so you can check that out and you can just see what’s involved, It just takes some time.
Where people really come unstuck is the rear control arms.
It is about $6,500 australian dollars for each new rear control arm from Maserati in Australia. If you have all four control arms go, or rather all four corners go, that’s eight control arms, Gets pretty expensive pretty quick.
How do you tell if your control arms need to be done?
The first thing you’ll probably notice is a clicking or a knocking noise in the back of the car while you’re driving.
Just normally, That could be the ball joint moving around, It could also be other suspension components.
Another thing you might notice is that when you’re going through a corner and you apply throttle, the car’s nose might dart around substantially.
If you notice that your control arms are shot, the ball joints are probably the point of failure, But if the ball joints gone, the control arm’s gone, We’ll get to that later.
And the reason that happens is it’s a double wishbone rear suspension. So as the suspension travels, it goes through a lot of toe change. If the control arms are gone, you get a lot of toe change, and that’s why your car will change direction, So those are the two things you’ll notice while driving.
So you can kind of tell that they need to be done when you’re driving around, Usually it’s when you’re driving in anger.
But if you want to figure out if they need to be done properly, the way you do it is you get the wheel off the ground, and you leave the wheel in the air, and you use the leverage of this wheel to move it back and forth, You’ll be able to hear “wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,”, Hear the ball joints or the bushings ticking, If it’s really bad, you’ll be able to see the wheel moving.
In most cases, a good mechanic should be getting under your car every service with a pry bar and just moving those ball joints to see if they’re on their way out. It should really never get to a point where you can grab the wheel and move it, But the reason it happens is because these cars will get sold on As soon as someone gets told at It’s $6,500 australian dollars for a control arm, and you need two of them, or three of them or four of them, the car will get sold on with this problem.
So you now have a car that needs its control arms replaced,What do you do?
We didn’t tell you at the introduction is that the upper control arm is no longer available.
So even if you do want to spend $6,500 an arm, you can’t, It doesn’t leave you with a lot of options to get your car back on the road. So We started looking around to see if there’s ways to rebuild these control arms and you cannot replace these ball joints. Now, We are going to do an engineering discussion, later on where I go over the specifics of why these ball joints cannot be replaced.
But for the moment, it’s fine to just work with the fact that if this ball joint is gone, the control arm is dead.
So, in Australia, you can legally convert a non-serviceable ball joint into a serviceable ball joint by drilling and tapping. You can buy some kits, Allows you to inject a plastic and then grease into the ball joint to fill in the gap and increase the service life of the ball joint. And then you can repeat that as needed going forward. It’s been done since the eighties.
It’s a proven way of solving problems, We were looking at doing that, but eventually We decided against it for one critical reason. These control arms are prone to failure anyway.
You can clearly see the casting seam on on the back of the bushings on upper control arm and lower control arm as well, These control arms were made by die casting, We believe they’re die casting from the materials testing that We had done.( We’ll show up in the engineering.)
They have a tendency to split the control arm along, The front control arms have a tendency to rip the ball joint clean out of the arm altogether. The manufacturers have actually revised this rear lower arm to try and prevent failures, If you have a look at the early cars, the early 4200s and 3200s, there’s a lot less reinforcement around these bushings, They’re thinner, slightly different angle, and they’ve got some weight saving holes cut into them.
The engineering that We did highlights why they needed to make these changes, These arms are incredibly prone to failure. So it didn’t seem like a practical option to proceed with rebuilding a set of existing control arms.
We went down the route of trying to source some good used control arms as well, We reached out some shops, but that control arms, unfortunately, they’re not in much better condition than what’s in the car, So We were not able to use them.
Which left us with one option, really.
With the original parts no longer being available, the serviceability of the existing control arms being quite risky for failure. Our last option was to make something brand new.
And We will go through all of the details of this control arm through an engineering discussion, But there are quite a few practical differences between the OEM control arms and We specifically designed this to be accessible to DIY’s and make the lives of mechanics easier.
