Non Motorcraft ball joint

[sehaare]

One other piece of advice since you seem fairly new to car repairs. Don't get sucked in by non-name brand parts that come with a lifetime warranty. That warranty won't mean much to you if you have to do the labor to replace then every year or two (or worse have to pay someone else to do it.). I fell into that trap when I was young and bought some cheap rebuilt front drive half shafts for another brand of car. After the left failed twice and the right three times, I ripped them out and put in costly name brand shafts and never had to fix them again. in over 10 years. Hope someone else learns from my pain.

 

[allmyEXes]

Last year 20,000 miles ago I installed SKP aftermarket brand Upper Control arms and Lower ball joints only on my blue '97 explorer and they have been doing well. Just yesterday I installed the first of 4 ball joints (rh UCA) on my Merc Mountaineer (SKP upper). I noticed that most of the negative camber came out of that side.
Aftermarket replacement ball joints are usually ok and changing them is a whole lot better than driving around on wore out ones. The rh upper that I removed was an original Ford part with 260,000 plus miles on it. It was the junky rubber injected design and looked like the ball stud was about to fall out of the socket joint.

 

[koda2000]

One other piece of advice since you seem fairly new to car repairs. Don't get sucked in by non-name brand parts that come with a lifetime warranty. That warranty won't mean much to you if you have to do the labor to replace then every year or two (or worse have to pay someone else to do it.). I fell into that trap when I was young and bought some cheap rebuilt front drive half shafts for another brand of car. After the left failed twice and the right three times, I ripped them out and put in costly name brand shafts and never had to fix them again. in over 10 years. Hope someone else learns from my pain.

+1 on this advice. As someone here recently said, "Poor man can't afford no cheap parts". A few years ago my daughter's '00 Mountaineer needed upper & lower ball joints. As she was footing the bill for the parts and didn't have much money I gave he the option of buying less expensive parts. I usually go with Moog Problem Solver suspension parts, but we went with Moog service grade uppers and Quik Steer lowers. The lower's were completely shot in about 2 years (maybe 20,000 miles) and I recently had to replace them as they were prematurely wearing her tires. This time I went with the top of the line Moog's, we replaced all four tires and had to pay for another wheel alignment. In the end saving a few dollars cost us many times more than what she saved.

Sometimes it makes sense to go with a less expensive part, but more often than not it turns out not to be worth it. If I can save a less expensive part that's easily changed if it fails I may gamble on it, but if something that can ruin your engine or requires hours to replace, spend the money on good parts. I will say that Motorcraft parts are often the best quality for your truck, but are often just too expensive! I often buy a less expensive quality part, but sometimes I'll opt with the Motorcraft part. It just depends how critical the part is. Whenever possible, stay away for Dorman brand parts. Their cheap and built to perform this way, but you'll find sometimes there's no other choice available.