I'm rebuilding the front suspension on my 74 Lesabre. I got an upper control arm off only to find the nuts holding in the bushings/shaft are spot welded to the control arm shaft. Was this a factory thing? Is there a way to deal with this other than cutting the shaft and putting in a new one?
YES . There was a factory recall on these . The nuts were not lock nuts so as the car went up and down the nuts would come off. Cars that didn't get the new lock nuts had the original nuts tacked to the shaft so they wouldn't loosen . This was done at the factory . Cars that were already at the dealers or were delivered had new lock nuts installed at the dealer as per the recall. I did a lot of these when I worked at the Buick dealer in the early 70's . If I remember correctly we used to get .7 to replace all 4 nuts . When some guys saw that the factory was tacking the nuts to the shaft they sometimes did the same . But I got caught . Tacking them was a lot easier than re[placing those 4 nuts . getting the old ones off was easy but putting those lock nuts on was a pain in the A$$ . They were cone lock nuts .
LOL, good ol GM. This more or less answers my other question. This was a quick fix for them which means I'm going to have to cut my shafts to replace the bushings. Thanks for the reply.
Either that or look around for another set of upper arms . Hell someone on here probably has a set of arms laying around . That would be my choice. Or does Rock Auto offer upper arm shafts ??
Yea I bought some from Rock. Interestingly I looked in my shop manual and they do mention the nuts could be welded on.
