It’s no surprise that we are trying to squeeze every last ounce of life out of our 15 year old family truckster. In so doing, there lots of “things” along the way. Some require more effort to maintain, some less. The most recent “thing” was discovered when I noticed Kris had a flat (what is normally a small effort to fix). The tire wasn’t taking air so I start to investigate thinking a trip to the tire shop for repair would be eminent. Upon investigation, I find that the tire didn’t have a puncture per se, but the tire had worn down on the inside edge so aggressively that the steel belts were showing through and tire could not physically hole air any longer. This was a sign of course.
Ford in their expert wisdom engineered this car with some random weird tire size because they look cool. Weird tire size = $$$$! Me, being the cheap bastard I am started looking for used tires because I just can’t fathom spending another grand on tires which would more than double the value of the car in this state of life. I found some in a day or two that were take-offs from an Audi and they cost a mere $100. I’ve grown accustom to mounting tires on my tire machine so within a few hours the car had fresh rubber on the back (the front tires were fine so I reserved the other 2 tires for a later date)… but the core “thing” had not yet been dealt with.
Naturally, the next step was to get an alignment so the car was run over to Pep-boys who informed us of something we weren’t surprised to hear… the rear end alignment couldn’t be completed without replacing bushings and freeing up the toe adjusters. The good news (if there was any to come out of this) was that their alignments were lifetime, so we could bring it back after I completed repairs for another adjustment.
Next up, I researched the necessary parts… replacement knuckles for around $450 each or knuckle bushings ($40 at local shops or $9 off amazon). Which route do you think I took? The replacement bushings would be no small feat to replace and would require a special tool to press in/out as well as lots of knuckle (my hand, not the part) bashing, head scratching, and choice words. But in the end, I replaced the rear knuckle bushings for about 20% of what it would have cost at the shop.
On to the next “thing”.
