[Tigers] Check Your Nuts

[Jay Laifman]

Wow.  That is really scary. Thanks for the warning.

I see what you are saying about the castle nuts.  However, I have to say,
in all the years I've taken off ball joints or tie rods, I've never ever
had one just slide off, and they always needed a tool and a lot of force.
So I'm wondering if something else happened there.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 2:19 PM Joe Brown <jbbrown1980 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So,  I took my Tiger out yesterday for a short drive and as I was just
> about home (maybe a hundred yards from my driveway) the right front
> suspension dropped to the ground and I skidded several yards before
> stopping.  All I could think of was the old stories about exploding ball
> joints.
>
> I walked to my house and threw a floor jack and some jack stands in my
> truck and drove back to the Tiger.  I managed to get the front end jacked
> up and discovered that the nut on the lower ball joint was gone and the
> lower A arm had dropped to the road.  My suspension pieces are at least 30
> years old and the ball joints were held on with nylock nuts. I managed to
> wrap a ratchet strap around the upper and lower A arms and I was able to
> slowly drive the car into my garage.
>
> I am very lucky that:
> 1. I was going pretty slow at the time
> 2. The front end landed in some loose gravel on the side of the road
> 3. None of the body work was damaged
> 4.  And nothing else in the suspension looks to be damaged; just scraped up
>
> If this had happened 5 minutes earlier I would have been doing 60 on a
> winding road and I would have wound up in a ditch.
>
> So I'm ordering a new set of ball joints and I will drill them out for
> castle nuts so I don't have to worry about a nut working its way loose
> again.
>
> Regards,
> Joe Brown
>
>
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