Replacing the lower ball joint W126 and other old MB 

Thank you and the best of luck to you.

That works of course too!

Thank you! You too!

I hear you on that. Even the hydraulic press needs special push or holding tools in order to get the old out and new one in. A press definitely takes care of the heavy grunt work.

Good luck and plenty of patience for you.

Thanks!

I believe you hit the nail on the head. Based of what I have been able to dig up on W115, 116, 123, 124, 126 cars, they were designed to provide a quiet and smooth ride. Especially 115, 123, 124 cars were once the heart of taxi fleets in Europe. That meant that they had to be very maneuverable in the tight medieval towns and cities. 116 and 126 shared a lot of those parts bins and it is no wonder how tight the turn radius is on even SELs.

Glad it was helpful!

The shock keeps the lower arm assembly in place and there is fortunately no need to mess with the springs.

​​​@@straybenzes I would still tie that spring to the shock and put an axle stand under the lower arm just in case.

@@bikeman123 That is a thought.

Thanks, Hugo. I use heavy-duty 2 1/2 ton jack stands and placed them under the car jack mounts as you may be able to see in the background here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SqHjvIlqfH8.html. The shocks keep the lower control arm assembly in place and there is no additional support needed to contain the springs. Hoping this will help you.

And there are more horror stories abound. The worst one I ever did I had to use a 5# hammer and used an acetylene torch to heat up the steering / axle to drive the old one out.

Oh I had to adapt the living daylights out of that tool. It was a loaner, but I had to buy it.

The front rotors are mounted to the wheel hubs from the rear side. That means you have to remove the wheel hubs with bearings to get to the rotors. So, removing the hubs is not difficult at all (but you have to adjust the bearing clearance once you are done). The most difficult part is to loosen the rotor bolts. Those are Allen head bolts, and a video on this channel explains how to best remove them. The rear rotors typically require you to back off the parking brake shoe adjusters. They are accessible from the rear through the brake shield. If you are replacing the rotors you can whack the old ones off with decent hammer blows. Good luck.

The ball joint cost is so cheap that I have just bought the ball joint and used the rubber boot when I found that the installed ball joint is still in great condition.

The only way to do this properly is boring the bad part out and replace it with a proper bushing. Just using a thread repair kit on such safety-related parts is not a good idea. Sorry for the bad news.

@@straybenzes thank you very much. We will do it properly.

Good luck. Hopefully it will not cost too much. @@azimutnorth8570

It was part of the ball joint removal tool kit from AutoZone.

Ah, I ended up having to go to Menards and get a 2 inch threaded sleeve and cut it in half, because they didn’t have short sleeves

But I ended up having to take the boot off, and putting the ball joint stem through the hole and putting the flat press fitting on the bottles of the spindle and pressing like so.I got one to work but had to take it to my local mom and pop shop to have it pressed in for $20!

@@unclepeanut8066 It can be quite the chore to get these out.

@@unclepeanut8066 That was a good move and cheap!

it's a very strange system lots of strange bits and designs in this front end... but it works.

Why easy if you can make it complicated.

Too late. You have got the bug now....