Adjustable ball joint question

I need to get some caster back on my front axle. I helped Nay install some many years back, but don't remember a whole lot. I see that both upper and lower adjustable ball joints are available for the D-30.

Is one preferable over the other?

Any brand recommendations?

Thanks,

Fred

adjustable ball joints are known to be far weaker.

what lift are you at? what is your castor at? im at ~5" of lift and run 5.5* of castor without vibes up to 70ish. id look at other solutions first.

sounds like you need adjustable control arms. installing adjustable or off-set ball joints is going to change your camber more than it is going to help caster.

As the taxi pointed out, adj. ball joints are use more to adjust camber.

Go for it.

Adjustable balljoints are used to correct caster often. People here usually only use them to fix camber but they are meant for caster correction just as much as they are for camber.

When we lift our XJ's, we run longer (or adjustable) control arms to adjust the pinion angle so we don't have vibes. The downside is that when you adjust pinion angle, you lose caster angle and your steering notices it. The way to correct pinion and caster at the same time is to cut and turn the knuckles. If you don't want to go through the hassle of that procedure, you can suck it up and try to maintain a decent balance between pinion angle and caster angle but its always a compromise... Adjustable balljoints are a fine solution to help regain some caster without sacrificing pinion angle.

This site has been down for a while now, but you can use the wayback machine search engine to find a cached version of it. See here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040320153258/http://madxj.com/

He has an article somewhere on there about using adjustable uppers and lowers to correct caster.

Adjustable ball joint are used for caster and camber correction, depending on which way you rotate them.
My 2001 XJ, with a LP D30 and 4" of lift, had just over 3 degrees of caster, after using the adjustable CAs to set the front axle's pinion angle to less than one degree, per the FSM.
Using a set of Napa Premium adjustable lower ball joints, the caster was corrected to 5 degrees and now steers better. The Napa joints have been in there for several years and are still tight. Just lube them occasionally.

We installed a set of Moog adjustable lower ball joints, in a friend's XJ and they failed within a year, so there are differences in construction quality.

Thanks, ert01 and lazyxj. That's the info I was looking for.

To the others, you might guess that as member number 15, I've been around and worked on XJ's for some time. I have adjustable upper and lower control arms. They are adjusted to get rid of vibes, however the front output of the NP241J, otherwise known as the Rocktrac, is a 1330 u-joint which does not take as much angle as a 1310. I was going to replace the outputs of the t-case to see if that would help first, however I went wheeling last weekend, and broke an axle shaft and destroyed a ball joint, so I need to do ball joints first. While I'm doing that, I'm also changing the knuckles to the 90+ knuckles since the axle on my 90 is from an 88, and I'd rather have the newer knuckles as they have more choices for brake parts. It's never simple around here.

Good info on the Moog BJ fail and Napa's still going. I'll be installing offset BJs for -camber this winter/early spring when I drop the front axle and section it off for oilpan clearance.

ert01 said:

This site has been down for a while now, but you can use the wayback machine search engine to find a cached version of it. See here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040320153258/http://madxj.com/
He has an article somewhere on there about using adjustable uppers and lowers to correct caster.

Click to expand...

It's sad to see how much good information has been lost when individual or public websites cease to be.