Front Suspension Upper Arm

[Jon_G]

Today will be known as "Black Wednesday"... my car has just suffered it's first MoT failure .

Failure was due to a worn ball joint on the front suspension upper arm (drivers side), so part 5 on this Ling's diagram... HERE and the top (horizontal) yellow component on Freddofrog's thread... HERE

Has anyone replaced this part themselves recently? If so, can you recommend a supplier (Honda are a little pricy so I'm looking for aftermarket, but I will check with HH). A quick look on eBay found this cheap part... LINK and also this slightly more expensive (but Delphi) one... LINK

I believe that you can just buy the balljoint and press into the old upper arm, but I don't have access to garage facilities, so I will need to buy the complete arm... it looks like a fairly easy DIY, but any feedback/thoughts would be appreciated! Do the two mounting bolts and ball joint shaft usually come out reasonably easily?

 

[freddofrog]

All those people who say "Hondas eat MOTs" ....errr no .... mine failed on rear caliper in December with front pads as advisory but then I had trouble getting the piston back on one of the front calipers

Jon you might be trail-blazing on this on the 7th gen, hopefully it's not too difficult to remove, although I don't know where the knuckle will want to go when you've undone the upper ball joint h34r:

You might want to buy items 12 and 13 from a dealer just in case the hex shaped Honda cheese decides to round off :lol:

Good luck, wish I could help out

 

[Jon_G]

Confession time... I'm not doing it now!

While I was waiting for the MoT, I got chatting to the garage owner and it turns out that our wives go to the same exercise class, etc, etc. Mid-afternoon he phoned me and asked if they could quote for the job... after a bit of haggling he offered to replace the complete arm (not just the balljoint, so therefore the bushes also get replaced) with a Delphi part, plus they'll also do the steering alignment and MoT re-test at the same time. And this will cost me less than I could buy the discounted part from Honda (to be fair this was Cox not Holdcroft, but I do also get a reasonable discount at Cox).

I'd even taken the wheel off, wire-brushed all the nuts and bolts and sprayed them with PlusGas to make a start! It does look a pretty easy job, but - as you say - you'd have to carefully control the release, probably using a trolley jack under the chassis and a bottle jack somewhere under the hub. If it wasn't freezing cold, with rain in the forecast, it might have even been enjoyable (and I would have documented it as a DIY, honest!).

 

[freddofrog]

In the summer time it could have been a bit of fun, though possibly scraped knuckles instead :lol:

But at this time of year it wouldn't really be fun IMO.

btw I just noticed on the Lings link that the right side is £150 and the left side is £140 :wacko: Well that's Honda price logic, probably they use goats cheese on the left of an Accord and cows cheese on the right

 

[Jon_G]

In the summer time it could have been a bit of fun, though possibly scraped knuckles instead :lol:

But at this time of year it wouldn't really be fun IMO.

btw I just noticed on the Lings link that the right side is £150 and the left side is £140 :wacko: Well that's Honda price logic, probably they use goats cheese on the left of an Accord and cows cheese on the right

Yeah, I kinda take the scraped knuckles for granted!

The full-on blizzard going on outside at the moment makes me think I made the right call on this one. It was spring last week, what's going on?

Honda 'non-symetric' pricing is anyones guess... maybe they sell more of the left side ones?

I had noticed that the handling was a bit off recently and it was noticeably tramlining when crossing road markings, etc, so hopefully that problem will go away. Unfortunately something (probably the worn ball joint) has thrown the tracking out and so I also got an advisory for unevenly worn front tyres.... but the new joint and tracking check/correction should catch this before the tyres are completely knackered.