Last Friday my wife was driving our '98 Limited when a lower ball joint separated causing a crash that could have been very, very bad. She is OK, and I thank God for that, but the truck is totaled. I had never considered this type of failure and never checked the front end too closely as there were no obvious indications of a problem-so don't be like me and check your front end out from time to time. The truck is now just south of Houston, and I'm currently working out the details with a friend on the TTORA board to part it out.

 

Thank God she is ok!

 

Wow! Good thing she is ok!

I saw that happen on the expressway yesterday, though it was just like this / for a couple of miles.

 

Sorry to hear about the loss, Good thing you wife is ok man !!

 

Glad nobody was hurt...

You're absolutely right about crawling around your rig every now and then to check things out.

 

It's too bad your 4Runner wasn't covered under the lower balljoint recall (only for '01 and '02 4Runners), otherwise, you might have been able to get some sort of compensation from Toyota.

 

How many miles did you have?

Thanks for the heads up. My 97 has 196k and I only quickly checked the front end when I purchased the truck at 169k. I'll check it at every oil change from now on.

 

Sold the truck to someone who's going to repair it. Bought the wife another- '07 SR5 4WD and she loves it

 

Over 250K

 

good things came out out of a bad occurrence.

Glad to hear all is well. Thanks for the warning, this happened here recently to Co 4 Lo founder Ric.

Check your balljoints regularly-everytime an alignment is done and more.

 

Nobody ever expects a balljoint to give out on the streets. Sometimes I worry when off-road, but never on road. I guess if/when you beat the piss out of it off-road you might want to make sure everything is ok when you get back on road.

This reminds me of one time my boss was driving one of our big class C box vans and as he was about to pull out onto the street going at about 3mph one of the spindles broke. I've never seen such a thing, especially on a vehicle only driven on the road and only a few years old with about 25k miles on it. Chevrolet ended up covering it even though it was out of warranty because of the situation. You don't expect a spindle to break like that!

 

Kind of an old thread - but wondering how to inspect the ball joints. I mean, what you would have seen if the week before the accident you looked at the ball joints? I've looked at mine but don't really know what I'm looking for... Can you really detect an imminent failure of the lower ball joint from a visual inspection?

 

Support the control arm so that you can pry upwards on the tire from underneath-a 2x4 3'-4' long would work well. If the joint is bad, you should see some play between the control arm and the spindle.