So last night I was driving in the Pao, still gleeful from finally getting it back after over a year out of service due to hitting that deer, when I drove over some railroad tracks, felt a horrible jolt, then stopped moving. Getting out, things looked like what you see above: a wheel in very much the wrong place. What the hell happened?
Rolling underneath, I saw that the control arm that the mechanic replaced – a mechanic that specializes in JDM cars, I should note – seems to have come off, somehow. This shouldn’t happen. David thinks perhaps a locking ring was forgotten, or something like that. I’m just happy I was going so slow when it happened, because if that control arm decided to stop, you know, controlling while I was on a highway or even going, say, 40 mph or so in traffic, things could have gone way, way worse.
I do like how the lights formed those stripes in that picture up there, though. I don’t like how the oil pan seems to have cracked when it smacked the ground as the control arm fell off, though.
I have to say my confidence in this mechanic is severely eroded. First I found an old, cracked hose on the brand-new radiator that was causing a coolant leak, and now my wheel pretty much fell off. I’m gonna have to have a stern conversation here today, and I am not a fan of those. Oy.
I had a tire shop try to sell me new front control arms while they were installing new tires. I blew off their advice because
A) My regular mechanic had just looked the car over and noted no issues with the steering gear or suspension and
B) If the car actually had needed repairs to such an important component, I wasn’t going to trust that to a tire shop. That’s something I would have my regular mechanic take care of.
The problem with the idea of a “JDM Expert” is that there are just too many different JDM cars with nothing in common except for some JIS screws and bolts.
Unless the ‘expert’ specializes in your specific make and model he or she has nothing special to offer unless he or she can read Japanese.
You are better off,IMHO, with a mechanic who works on unusual cars, regardless of country of origin, who will focus on fundamentals.
I honestly think a lower control arm should not take a ‘JDM specialist’. It’s 3 bolts. You just gotta tighten all 3 of them 😉
The thing is a JDM specialist would probably notice the part they installed isn’t up to spec, as Nissan specifies a castle nut + cotter pin and the picture from Jan 23rd clearly shows a friction nut instead.
And this is why Autopian is poised to be such a runaway success – the writers will go to any length to create compelling stories.
Unsafe vehicles, terrible purchases, eating shellfish from garden implements, life-threatening trips, mold, rust, spiders, and yes, even working on malaise-era Mopar crap (Dodgey repairs?).
Torch, we love you. Stay safe.
People make mistakes. I would not go into this being angry or show anger with the shop. Remember- the fate of your car is in their hands. Either that or you need to learn how to fix your own car.
If your only choice is a shop that makes mistakes like this, you’re better off learning how to fix your car. The Pao is a late 80s Micra/March underneath, it can’t be that complex to wrench on. And when you do your own wrenching, you know whether you’re installing up-to-spec OEM parts or cheap knock-offs that cut important corners, like this control arm with a ball joint secured with only a friction nut, when the proper part would’ve come with a castle nut and cotter pin.
Glad you got all the way across the tracks before it went Pao.
Right in the kisser.
I don’t trust any mechanic further than I can throw them. Some of the worst work has been from the “I’ve been doing this 30 years!” types. I avoid them at all costs.
I’m done letting other people touch my cars. No one cares about the quality of work more than I do and if something goes wrong I know exactly who to blame.
Savings in labor costs will eventually justify buying a hoist, I hope.
Same. I would rather have my car down for a week while I find time to do it because then I know it’s done right.
So I’m not the only one who checks behind any work they have done by a mechanic. I’ve pretty much turned every wrench on everything I’ve owned since before I had a driver’s license. I mowed lawns with lawnmowers I fixed to do that job. When I was 14 I earned enough money to buy a $500 car that needed rings and a transmission rebuild. I don’t shy away from the hard things. At this point in my life, I don’t have access to a tire machine or a balancer so I at least need to have someone replace my tires. I got new tires in January and checked the pressure and torque specs in the parking lot before I drove away. The look I got from the shop manager when I showed up with a 2 foot torque wrench was priceless.
Well, he is a certified installer of Altezza tail lights, anyway.
Glad you’re ok. I’m sure naming the shop in the blog might get you in trouble but at least there is google reviews you can use to vent our your frustrations if they don’t make this right.
That’s horrific! Glad you’re ok.
Over the 9 years I had my Lotus I used all the specialist mechanics within 100 miles of me (in the uk, so maybe six places) and crossed them off the list when they did something unacceptable (like melting the roof, putting parts from someone else’s Elise on to mine, not actually changing the oil and air filters, that sort of thing). When you have to mark-up service items to check they get replaced you know all trust is gone.
That’s how I ended up renting a barn for three months so I could do the work myself. Cheaper and better quality work, but such a pain in the arse. If you aren’t an automotive engineer this isn’t an option.
There was one guy I didn’t try, a guy I actually know, who is very meticulous. He was always booked solid six months in advance.
Even though my current cars are much more common and less specialist I’m slowly crossing Toyota and BMW guys off the list. The local Toyota dealer cocked up my GT86 valve spring recall twice, once setting the timing wrong and then fixing that lead to my car dumping its oil out of a hole punched out of the cam cover.
Ha, thank you for clarifying you’re in the UK. Doubtful that there are even six Lotus specialist shops in the entire U.S.
You might be surprised. There are three that I have heard of or personally know in Florida.
Now, two of them I’m not sure if they work on older ones, but the third does.
I wonder if he’s retired, actually. Last I talked to him was about a decade ago and he was kinda old.
Some quick research shows that control arm comes with the ball joint already installed. Shit happens my guy, the part may have been bad. Who would have known? But the fact that you took it up on a website, it I was that mechanic, I would tell you to kick rocks.
Charge it to the GAME
Damn. That is a a cold start.
It sounds like you plan to, but give the mechanic a shot to make it right. At a minimum, it’s a parts warranty claim, at worst, it’s negligence. If they can’t or won’t make it right, have your favorite attorney (maybe Mercedes knows someone…) draft a strongly-worded letter. They should either fix this or be liable for charges accrued to do so elsewhere.
Right on. This person gives “shade-tree mechanic” a bad name.
This is the sort of thing that could only happen to a complete doofus and I speak from experience. I replaced the lower control arms on my son’s Jeep a few years ago and, for whatever reason, the new Moog control arms didn’t come with castle nuts or locking nuts. The castle nuts from the old control arms had different threads so I couldn’t reuse them. Oh well, i thought stupidly, I guess that’s just how these newer control arms are designed. Sure enough, about 100 miles later, one of the control arms came loose just like yours did. Also like yours, it was during a low-speed maneuver rather than on the highway. I still have nightmares about how bad this could have been for my son, and how stupid I was.
I had a lower control arm issue…
I replaced both lower control arms on my wife’s Forester.
The ball joint was installed with the new control arms, with castle nuts and cotter pins.
A while after the install, clunking noises became evident.
I checked the torqueing of the bolts securing the arm to the body, along with everything else I had removed to install the arms. Still clunking. Checked again.
Replaced the front wheel bearings.
Still clunking. Inspected for faults in the arms, found nothing.
Then, one night after driving home, I raised the front end and darned if there wasn’t movement at the lower left ball joint. I had made the assumption that the manufacturer would have installed it correctly. Silly me, I should have known better.
Tightened it up ( reinstalling cotter pins, of course ), no clunks since.
I expect it to be all fixed at no cost to you, accompanied with some downright pitiful grovelling. Long term your call, but I wouldn’t forgive or forget.
A four-eyes job, I like that phrase.
Are one-eye’d mechanics paid half as much? That seems unfair. 🙂
Use that with damn near every job in aircraft maintenance.
I’ve found that “specialists” are almost always a bad idea. In your mind, you think “Oh, they specialize in (insert car), so they must be really good at (insert car) work!” In truth, it generally means that they’re only barely competent enough to work on one type of car, and couldn’t hack it working on anything else. I try to outsource as little work as possible, but from Saabs to Range Rover Classics, from original Minis to 5.0 swapped Volvos, I’ve always found that the random person down at the local trusted mechanic shop does significantly better work than any specialist. I’ll note one exception, that being Matt Kwiek at Kwiek Classics in Nashville. That guy can wrench on a Mercedes like no one else. That said, he’s also excellent at everything, so maybe my mantra still applies.
Are you sure it was the mechanic’s fault? The ball joint seems to have come out of the lower control arm. From what I see online, the mechanic would have replaced (control arm, lower ball joint) as an assembly and this would be a part quality issue, not mechanic issue. But I’m not certain
Yeah I’m looking at photos of these on eBay and dealing failing to see how the mechanic would be at fault. I don’t quite understand if the ball joint itself failed or if the ball joint assembly got pulled out of the LCA.
Either way, if you want to direct your anger at someone, get mad at the idea of aftermarket parts! Save a little bit of money by forgoing all of the engineering effort and validation and supplier quality control of an OEM piece. Bonus points for hubris and hand waving “it’ll be fine”. But really maybe this was a Nissan part, not sure
Ball joint is a press fit. There is no such thing as a press fit ball joint without some sort of locking mechanism included.
Same here, that’s a parts defect not the mechanics fault warranting a Wich hunt because of it’s failure.
I had a new MOOG ball joint installed in one of my cars…it broke in half a month later….the ball joint…I didn’t go burn my mechanic house down and take their dog, nor did I file suit against Moog…. I installed another one and rode off into the sunset.
As a small business owner this post pisses me the fuck off.
It really shouldn’t. Anyone in JT’s shoes would have an issue, here. A shop replaces your control arm, and within a few months it nearly gets you into a crash.
Plus, if I have this right, the shop replaced a radiator, but kept old, rotten hoses, leading to a leak. That’s just unacceptable.
Well, if you see hoses are unfit you tell customer and get them to ok it, then you replace it. If they don’t ok it, you note it in the work order that they denied service
But yes. This.
I had a shop do shocks on my Thunderbird a long time ago…
They didnt tighten the shocks to the rear axle and they came loose.
Thus began my decent into doing my own work.
I found the ( iirc ) grade 8 bolts and installed them myself.
Since then, I’ve replaced the head gasket on an E34 525, replaced the suspension and cooling system on an E46 328i. Oil changes without number. Control arms on my Ranger ( and now I am trying to remember if the ball joints had castle nuts and cotter pins, going to inspect soon ), Timing chain on an E39 540 ( which turned out badly, apparently I lost a nut down the intake, destroyed a cylinder wall and valve ). Control arms and front wheel bearings on my wife’s Forester. And, finally, doing my first clutch job on the Ranger above. My father in law replaced it a while ago ( the truck was his at the time ), but he didn’t replace the slave cylinder. Said slave cylinder decided to stop working after getting us moved from CA to CO. I am replacing master, slave, got the flywheel surfaced and purchased new clutch kit.
Agreed. My mechanic has carte blanche when doing any work on my car to replace nearly anything he sees that needs replacing (withing budget limitations of course). If it is a high $ item, he calls me and we decide together whether it needs replacing at this time. But anything like cables, hoses, brackets, bearings, bushes, driveshaft boots etc, literally anything that could become a problem, he just changes.
Here in winterland, we have a rash of incidents every year with people losing their wheels after improper torquing during seasonal tire changeovers. It’s beyond unacceptable. Shops that can’t get that right need to be charged with criminal endangerment.
This one is tough- I do all my own winter tire changeovers (4 cars). I torque them all with a torque stick while on the jack and then re-check with a torque wrench once they are on the ground. I go back a week later and re-torque them all and I almost always find one or two lugs that are loose. It’s more likely on the Volvos with lug bolts than the others with lug nuts for some reason.
Tire shops around here ask you to come back after a week for a retorque but hardly anyone does.
I pretty much do the same, except only one vehicle. I don’t torque off the ground but hand tighten, then drop the jack and finish it off. I recheck a few days later. No real scientific ‘after so many days or km/miles’ rule as I figure a few trips on Toronto’s pothole moonscape probably sets everything anyway. Interestingly, I have done this for well over a decade and never found a loose bolt on the second check. Maybe it’s differences in manufacturers? You mention Volvo, perhaps they have an issue they should look into.
Also “Tire shops around here ask you to come back after a week for a retorque but hardly anyone does. ”
This is in the ‘everybody says they floss’ category. Even as someone interested in cars, I’m not going to the tire shop again if I can avoid it.
“NO GODDAMN ANTI-SEIZE ON THREADS”
Amen on that, but maybe some lith grease on the hub would be kind to the next person who has to pull the wheel…
Looking at the published pics from the older article, the hoses look OK — not great, but OK. I would chalk that up to the rad finally holding pressure again, and exposing the leak. Kind of like when the new brake lines on one of my old cars exposed the leak in the a line furthre towards the wheel. I am in the “unless you replaced those hoses recently, do them too” camp, but I can see where it would happen if they looked OK.
As for the ball joint, that’s clearly a bad part, and not the mechanic’s fault. The arm would have come with the ball joint installed. They should re-do the repair, but getting mad at them for something they didn’t directly cause helps no one.
Now if they don’t re-do the repair, get mad.
So DT and Rootwyrm jumped to conclusions: https://www.theautopian.com/guess-whos-back-back-again-cold-start/
The photo shows the ball joint coming out of the lower control arm, not the knuckle? I see everyone liking your post, but I don’t think the photo reflects what you’re saying. It would appear that the ball joint is still attached to the knuckle, and that’s the insinuated error of the shop…
I don’t see anything that would retain the ball joint to the control arm other than the press fit. Take a look here:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334150373203
As for the shop standing by parts: sure, they should cover the repair, but parts for a Pao are probably hard to come by and might not be available from repeatable suppliers.
I love Torch but the anger seems misguided?
Or…is there a better pic of the issue that would validate that I am the asshole here? I have no axe to grind, this just seems off!
Hey Torch –
Semi-locally, I would highly recommend Grosse Pointe Auto Care. I have been using those guys for years. They work on all manner of weird cars, vintage cars, modern ones, and they will use your parts if you provide them. Proper mechanics there.. They’re on Kercheval in Grosse Pointe Park. I know it’s probably not super close to you but a good mechanic is worth a little trip in my opinion.
Good luck man – this definitely sucks!
Jim
I just realized you don’t live in Michigan, which I already knew.. so I guess scratch that comment.. sorry man.. but for anyone else local to the Detroit area, check these guys out.
Jim
This is exactly right. Get your money back and get the hell out of there.
Good luck, and may your Pao return to fighting form soon enough.
Jason, you should’ve taken it to your neighborhood Nissan Pao dealership.
Years ago, I bought a used Mercedes 560SL from the place in Chapel Hill that everybody absolutely RAVES about.
It was a horrible experience. The car came with a slow oil drip from around the drain plug and it resulted in me taking it back numerous times for stopgap measures because they just refused to replace the pan. They sold it to me with bad shocks and worn out brakes, which I had to replace at my own significant expense. Then the master cylinder locked up. Then the radiator neck broke off.
I ended up selling the car back to them at a loss.
IDK what the moral of this story is, unless it’s just that even if thousands of people love a dealer/servicer, they can still screw you.
Sounds about right for a used Mercedes though.
Some places have a strange way of making people feel really good about being screwed over, or do it in a way that makes it seem like they are giving the customer a really good deal or helping them out. They keep an industrial sized vat of Vaseline on the premises, and use it liberally. Those are the most insidious shops, and it sounds like you found one.
I definitely hate that my old guy shop owner sold out and retired this December. I rarely take things to anyone, but he was the only one I kind of trusted. but even then I had a few instances where I had to provide details as to the probable cause. the GM stability tracking sensor in the column during rack replacement kind of surprised me when they did not know about it, but in the end they were always better for old stuff anyway.
Damn. Good luck! Hopefully all goes well & the shop makes amends somehow. It’s so frustrating when you think you’ve found a good shop, and a specialist at that, and then they do subpar work. Currently I’m a bit miffed with a local specialist shop which despite being highly regarded in the community because they’ve occasionally muffed things albeit in minor detail so nothing as catastrophic as what you just experienced. (Ha, miffed & muffed in the same sentence? What’s next, Biff will buff Marty’s Toyota truck?) I daresay I speak on the behalf of all of us readers that we’ll be curious as to how you end up handling this matter especially since it seems like there’d be a little more than a stern conversation involved.
Gah, will there ever be an edit function? What I just wrote would’ve gotten some red penciling by either an English teacher or an editor, good grief.
Sorry that happened to you torch, but we’re all glad it didn’t end worse. I’ve seen more than my fair share of major suspension component failures and lost a close childhood friend due to shoddy work by a mechanic. Just glad you’re safe.
Can you spill the beans in code so I can avoid them as well?
I am looking for a jdm mechanic in the Chapel Hill area for my S2000 and am now nervous.
I haven’t decided to out them yet but if you email me I’ll share privately.
Negotiations pending. “Do you know who I am and how far my reach is?” – Jason to said shop.
“See? I’m can reach that pickle jar. That’s right.”