In other news... I had a bolt on one of the ball joint adapters fail on my way home from work at lunch today. I've been driving the car conservatively and only short distances just in case something fails. I was going around a decently fast left hand turn and heard a clunk from the right front.
Since I was just a few blocks from home, I just finished the drive at low speed and put the car up on the jack to have a look in the garage. The back bolt (far left on the diagrams) on the adapter was plain old missing. My guess is that you're not supposed to re-use those bolts when swapping ball-joints, since they're lock nuts. I either had it work loose and fall off, or just plain popped the threads on it since those bolts were all kinda old and cruddy.
So, I'm going to have to do some legwork this weekend to get some bolts. Ever since the Ace Hardware closed down, it's impossible to find a local source for high-grade metric hardware. Or I'm going to have to order them from the dealer and wait for shipping. I tried grade-8 1/2" bolts as a stop-gap, but they're just a touch too big to fit through the 12mm holes in the LCA, and I'm not going to drill out the LCA just to fit some incorrect SAE hardware.
The good news is that the wheel didn't fly off!
