Well i had to go rescue my friend last week because this happened to him. Then help him fix it for the next two days. He is EXTREMELY lucky this didnt happen to him while he was going down the road at 60... he just heard his front end creaking as he was parking so he started to back up and this happened.

I guess this is what can happen when you dont pay attention to the size of the pothole you are flying through when youre wheeling, like he has done MANY times lol. The front end of this truck has been off the ground many times, not on purpose tho.. Im really surprised it lasted this long!




Never before have i seen a lower control arm so destroyed. The scary thing is that there were no new breaks in the metal there.. the knuckle just finally decided to rip its self out of there. The whole top piece of the the arm where the knuckle sits was all blown out, and it had just been hanging in there by a thread for who knows how long.





One bent CV...



Then after we get it all fixed he decides to sell it >_<




Edit: Sorry for the large pictures.. Photobucket sucks

 

sorry to say man thats for being stupid and careless....

thats my opinion

why beat on it like that ? ya know

 

Yeah i know thats what i was saying, but i dont think it was all him.. the previous owners beat the crap out of it and those cracks in the metal were really old.

And when he first got it the truck leaned to that side and i thought it was the torsion bar so i tightened it up a little but it was still off, then after we fix it that side was then higher than the other. So i think the bad lower control arm was the culprit the whole time. We just never looked at it.

But sending the front end in the air didnt help at all lol. It happened twice when we were driving up a fire service road in about a foot of snow and found a huge pot hole that you obviously couldnt see till it was to late.. But like a Chevy it just kept right on going and got us back down with no problems.

I suppose we could have been driving slower but we wanted to keep our speed u so we could get up the hills.

 

I had something similar happen to me in my '73 Chevelle. I was backing out of a parking spot, when I heard something scraping, and the steering wheel started pulling funny. I got out to look, and the lower control arm had broken, right where the front bushing is, where it attaches to the frame and pivots. Then the spring pressure pushed it down until the arm contacted the pavement. The other bushing was still holding, and where the ball joint is. We had to jack the car up, and put a tire dolly under the arm to get it on the wrecker.

I was very lucky, like your friend, that I wasn't doing 60 on the highway.

 

Yup sure have , same thing happened to my blazer on Monday , not quite that bad though but the guys at auto zone liked it . My ball joint broke and tryed to come up through the a arm , it cracked it in three spots were the grease fitting comes through .

 

i have ripped the ball joint off the upper control arm before. on both sides actually. Although i was offroading when it happend and i tend to beat on mine pretty hard. you gotta pay to play

 

A little grease in the ball joints helps. I have been four wheeling for 50 years & never had anything even close to that happen. I have beaten the crap out of plenty of vehicles, but the thing I do is continued preventive maintenance & inspect. Because places I go are so far from any kind of help that if not prepared it could cost you your life in winter. Cellphones are useless in most of Nevada except the I-80 corridor & the towns. The out back in much of Arizona aren't much different.

 

Lol nope, but I saw an upper control arm look like this.
Kinda scary going down I29 at 75mph+ & realizing later your front end was like this.
I agree with the OMFG factor if he was on the highway when it may have decided to go kaplooey.

 

I had to get my lower control arm replaced on my Eclipse. I was on an underway when I was still on the submarine, my wife and a friend of ours was taking the car to the store. They started going down the hill to get to the store, and they noticed there were kids playing in the middle of the road at the bottom of the hill. They go to hit the brakes, slid on ice, so it wasn't stopping. They managed to get enough traction that they slammed the Eclipse to a stop by going into a curb. We drove it afterwards for a few months, not realizing that the control arm was busted. When we finally had it looked at, the mechanic damn near choked, saying that he is surprised it hadn't fallen off by that point.

I've also had my outer tie-rod on the Eclipse give out. I was doing 75-80 on the highway, was trying to hurry up and get to the store to get gas and smokes before having to go to work. Got off the highway, started turning into the gas station parking lot, when it went out.

 

I am definitely looking at everything at least every oil change or after i go offroading from now on lol. I really dont wanna be in a top heavy blazer when i lose a tire doing 60.. that would suck for me and everyone else around me ha.