When would you change out the lower ball joint.

Have any of you replaced the lower ball joint before? Is there a recommended time frame to replace? Like every 100k miles or so?

 

Not sure what recommended is as far as mileage, but if the boot is torn it should be changed. If you can pull on it and it has any play at all it should be changed. I have never taken one apart that had less than 150k miles. Every one I ever took apart was shot and in dire need of being changed, not all of them had torn boots.

 

If it was a Dodge I'd tell you every 40,000 miles. I've worked on cars and I have to say Toyota makes the best lower ball joints. I've seen them go 200k miles plus and still ok. I recently did a suspension on a Tacoma where the owner wanted to get rid of his lift and put all the stock suspension back on. He had original lower ball joints and at 160k miles they were still good. One of the boots was deteriorating so we went ahead and replaced them. At 100k I would be willing to say they are still ok as long as the boot is intact.

 

This is good to know. Next time i'm under i'm definitely going to check out the boot then. I think i'm just getting paranoid because i have been seeing multiple people's lower ball joints giving out.

 

A lot of the ones you see going out are on older 4Runners. One thing to keep in mind, if you run bigger tires with an aggressive offset in the wheels, can cause it to wear down faster so it’s a good idea to always just check up on your suspension to make sure it’s in proper working order.