Will balljoint trouble ever go away?

[Blacksheep Josh]

Okay, if you look at my recent threads, i had a thread about replacing my balljoints myself. work took a lot longer then expected, but they went in.

i did my left side over a wednesday afternoon and thursday morning. got dark quicker then i thought.

did my right side that friday.

got the alignment done either that saturday or sunday... this wasn't even 3 weeks ago.. and i replaced all 4 ball joints, because originally i had one bad balljoint on my lower left side.

listen to this.

the first time i had the alignment done, they didn't get it right. i called them back and said it's still pulling to the left, they said it was because the front two tires had worn down to an unsafe point. so i had two tires put on someplace else about a week, week and a half later.

went back today because there's a warranty on the alignmnet, they then told me, "we can't finish the alignment because your upper balljionts are bad"

what do i do?

 

[JDraper]

If you installed them after the initial alignment, you're out of luck. You changed the condition of the truck and the fault is not of the shop. If they did the alignment after the new balljoints were installed, then I would go back to them and tell them that the balljoints were new when you did the alignment and they need to abide by their warranty.

 

[Blacksheep Josh]

yeah, balljoings were put in BEFORE the initial alignment...

that's why i had to get the alignment, cause i had replaced the balljoints. sorry if that was confusing. i'm getting like 4 other opinions tomorrow.

by the way, my explorer's time is coming up... i'm starting to look into a more efficient vehicle.

i hope to have another one one day, especially the first generation... i hate to let go of it, but i got to... can't afford the gas.

 

[Anime]

From my experience, it's a pretty common thing with alignment shops to give customers a line about ball joints or tie rods being bad and needing replacement even on brand new cars...since they assume most people don't know any better and will just have them do the work and then the alignment (though I doubt they actually do the work, since the parts on the car are still good, so they just charge for parts they never used and labor they never performed). If they have no idea your balljoints are new (which would be kind of strange since they'd need to at least look at them to check the alignment hardware if it wasn't perfectly aligned already), maybe this is what's going on. In any case, if they really do have a warranty on it, you should be getting alignments until it's spot on.

Personally, I've had it with alignment shops. It's more hassle than it's worth to get ripped off and then go back and have to argue your case about getting a warranty they promised in the first place. Good luck with yours, though. Usually if you get any hassle at all, you'll be in for a ride.

 

[protomind]

Try reasoning with them, if that fails a call to your state attortney generals office has is known to work wonders. Before you call them however, you should confront the shop with your receipts and your obvious knowledge of how the truck works.

 

[DeRocha]

You installed 4 new ball joints and the shop is saying one or more is bad? Where the ball joints tight when you installed them? By that I mean before you installe them could you move the shaft around easily? When I was at AutoZone getting some ball joints for a friends Explorer the new ball joints were flopping around in the box (manufacturing defect at the get go)...

 

[Blacksheep Josh]

when i installed them, id have to put my entire body weight against it to move... and i weigh close to 300lbs, and i actually took the spindles off the truck, and had a shop put press out the old ones, and press in the new ones, and they said everything looked fine.

i'm going to try and get a second opinion eiher this weekend, or monday for sure at least.

is it to much to ask, for a truck that drives straight!!!??? lol