Goofaroo

I put a set of Meyle upper control arms on my car about 3 years a 50k miles ago. Recently, it developed a rattle coming from the driver side which I assumed to be a strut mount. This morning I removed the strut and the old mount actually looked pretty good so I started looking at everything else.

The sway bar bushes and links are tight and everything else seems in order. The ball joint in the Meyle uca is still nice and tight and the bushings look fine but I found that if I grab the control arm and push in and out on it there was a rattle that I'm sure it the culprit. I pulled it off assuming that the bushes would have some slop but they don't. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a new arm locally and my wife needs the car so I stuck it back together.

Now I'm looking into ordering a new arm and it occurred to me that possibly the mounting bolts are worn causing enough slop to account for the rattle. Has anyone had to replace the mounting bolts before? I hate to order a new uca only to find that I just needed a couple of bolts. The car has around 190k with about 50k on the arms. I generously coated the threads and the shoulders on the bolts with anti-seize when I installed the new arms.

I am kicking myself that I didn't measure the shoulders on the bolts and the ID of the bushing sleeve before I reassembled. Has anyone else fixed this rattle with new bolts?

dicer

As long as the bolts were originally tight, the bolts can not wear since there is no movement there. The bushings are not really bushings they are a spherical joint just like the ball joint is. If they have slop that you feel when its together and the bolt is torqued to proper torque, then its the worn joints. You will not always feel it without having that leverage of the control arm to feel it. And that leverage also translates that very tiny movement in the joint into a much larger movement at the end of the lever.