Winter is back

Do you remember that line from The Search for the Holy Grail where the narrator talks about the weather, as it goes from spring, to summer, to fall, to winter, skips a few seasons, etc.? Well, that is what happened here. We somehow managed to skip summer and fall, and went straight from a great week of spring back into winter. I was going to go drag racing tomorrow night, but I know that they wont open the track with the weather this bad. When the temperature drops, they have a hard time prepping the track, and traction is too low to run on slicks. They might allow it during the street legal nights, but that's it.

I am filling my time in the garage anyways. Not with my car, but with my friend's girlfriend's car. She has a 96 Taurus, which is in dire need of new ball joints. Ford saw fit to make all of the joints on the car greaseless, but it doesn't matter too much when the boots are destroyed. The cars lower ball joint cannot be removed without removing the half shaft, as the CV joint is in the way. I read on the internet that it is possible to remove it with the half shaft in place, but I am willing to bet that the guy who did it that way managed to obliterate the CV joint boot in the process.

The driver's side is mostly disassembled, but the ball joint press that Ryan purchased is too small to fit over the lower ball joint and control arm, so we will need to get a bigger one. Also, as we got into it we found that not only was the lower ball joint bad, but also the joints on the stabilizer bar.

Now, I don't have a great deal of experience working on FWD mid 90's sedans, but I found this really odd. The stabilizer bar link is plastic. Plastic suspension components just don't sit well with me. I don't know if I could keep a straight face in a meeting where someone brought up the idea of making something like sway bar links out of plastic. But not only did they make it out plastic, they integrated the ball joints into the link, so if they go bad, you have to replace the entire component. I guess that kind of maintenance interval will keep the plastic from becoming brittle. . . How did Ford stay in business this long?