Why We Are Making Control Arms

So I’ve got the dreaded control arm play in the rear end of my car, This makes me sad.

Unfortunately the costs for replacements are very unreasonable. The pattern part from Eurospares is only available on the lower arm, and with the exchange rate being double that adds up to way too much for a part that will fail again in the future. If you’re going to make a disposable part it should have a disposable price.

I spoke with New Model Wreckers in Sydney and bought some used arms from them, but unfortunately they were also in poor condition. They kindly refunded the costs and left me with the parts.

I spoke with Trident spares but unfortunately that pesky dollarydoo makes it hard to justify buying used parts, and then, again, you don’t really know if there is play until the joint is loaded up so there is a lot of effort involved in swapping the part before you really know and since they have a 100% failure rate I’m really only delaying the inevitable even if I do get a good one. This has lead me to the only logical conclusion, which is to put in a fairly unreasonable amount of effort designing the whole part again from scratch to include a replaceable ball joint. This allows me a chance to remove one of the engineering level problems with the car and save some money fixing it (it is kind of nuts that this should be cheaper).

So what do I do now? I take you on my journey from start to finish, success or failure.