WTF! SPC Dual Balljoint Failure <15k miles

Am I missing something?
Been chasing a clunk on the girlfriend’s Sequoia. While doing a tire rotation I found it. Driver side balljoint has 3/8” play, and passenger side has about 1/8”. Play is in the ball socket. Pretty Fawking scary.

I’m running Icon Mid Travel coil-overs. Are SPC’s maxed out at normal travel? Both boots are torn.

I torque everything to spec all the time, I have 5 various 1st gens, and maintain them heavily.

I noticed when I installed these they sat very deep in the seat, and on the driver side the nut was higher than the cotter pin hole. Did I botch the instal? Side note, I have 3 rigs in the driveway running SPC’s.

Pics are at full droop.


Cotter Pin removed as I tried to tighten.


Angle at full droop. Doesn’t look too crazy?

 

I don't think you're mistaken unfortunately. There have been numerous reports of SPC's quality heading drastically downhill in recent years, so you may have fallen victim to that. I think they're trying to make up for it with warranty coverage, so it's at least worth a call to see if you can score a new set to ball joints to replace yours. Best of luck!

 

Regular street use, or did they see some off roading? EDIT: you didn't do that susp upgrade to roll on pavement hahaha, my bad.
My uppers are Moog. Don't hear much about that being bad, but I'm never off pavement (for now).
The fitment issue reminds me of when I discovered one whole front suspension unit had been replaced with a newer version
One WE caliper... one WL.
Any accidents on the side you can't get the cotter pin in? (Different spindle)

 

I had tp buy mine. They are just recently starting to become available for purchase. https://www.tundras.com/threads/spc...n-update-and-part-number.144357/#post-3628233

 

https://www.tundras.com/threads/spc...n-update-and-part-number.144357/#post-3628233

 

Thank you for the link.

Crazy they aren’t warranting it. I haven’t even offroaded this thing. It’s been the girlfriend’s kid runner. We do live on a rough road and small farm, but no fire road bombing.

Has anyone had these balljoints fail/ blow apart? My Tacoma has a bad U-Joint and my Ram is getting warranty work done and I don’t have a spare vehicle at the moment.

Looks like Slee’s has them in stock right now. I’m going to see if they can over night them and I’ll swap them at the camp ground this week lol.

 

What's the SPC part number for the replacements you put in? 25001?

Never have had my SPC boots tear with EXT Kings and heavy off-road use. I've had mine develop excess side-to-side play, but nothing noisy nor any catastrophic failures. I've replaced each side once with the 25001s and didn't have any issue getting the cotter pin holding up with SPC's 45 ft-lb torque spec.

FWIW, the grease-able ones (not sure about their non-greaseable) should have some up and down play, but your play sounds excess and different from this.

 

I would check the SPC site to confirm the part number. 35102 is the part number for the UCA 25490 for the 07-21 Tundra. 35102 is the only one available as well. The other 2 styles are discontinued. I don't know if the other years are different.

 

The greasable ones are supposed to have movement when there is no weight on them? I'll take a video of the movement in mine this weekend. The shop told me they were bad when I had my wheels put on. I haven't installed the new joint yet. I will still install them since they are maintenance free.

 

Drive, with a load?

Make your whole family drive in a separate car...

 

24585 is the UCA for First Gen Tundra/ Sequoia. 25001 is the part number for 24585 with the greaseable zerks. 35109 is the "upgraded" sealed one.

 

https://www.spcalignment.com/partFAQ/25001_FAQ.pdf

 

Huh, I wonder how much that play contributes to noise (clunks in front) and how many of us running SPC/Eibach uppers are actually getting our little clunks (I've been chasing mine and it's driving me fucking nuts) is actually coming from the SPC greasable UBJ?

If I knew 100% that's where the tiny little padded "clunk" is coming from, from the springloaded balljoint, I'd go non-greasable in a heartbeat. Even if the lifespan was lower, as long as catastrophic fail wasn't an issue.

I can confirm: My clunk was loud at first, until a couple dozen miles after I realized the driver's side UBJ wasn't lubed because I swapped grease tubes after the passenger side, and had an air bubble in my gun, so I only got maybe 2-3 pumps into it max. After greasing, the clunk was still barely there, but muffled. But was the same clunk. So far I've quashed 4-5 clunks on my suspension. I've got two remaining, one in the ass-end that's more of a metal-on-metal rattle sound, and one tiny little clunk up front that I was thinking has to be the Toytec Alumas, but wasn't 100% positive.

 

Did you forget to grease them up on install and every 5k miles?

 

I filled them when new, but if you look the bottom of the boots are separated. These have maybe 12k miles on them, if they can’t go that long then I’m not sure what to say.

 

Looks like the newest version of their balljoints have a lot of “improvements”.

I don’t really have another option but to upgrade. I’ll be ordering these today.

 

Throwing this over here too, for those who may catch it in the future.

There are/were 3 diff't UBJ for our 1st gen Tundra/Sequoia SPC uppers (SPC UCA p/n 25485). One greasable/zerked, which most of us probably have currently installed b/c our arms came with them preinstalled, two ungreasable/no zerk. One w/o zerk is discontinued because of some issue with an internal spring that was bothersome for inspection stations (??!).

SPC shows that here in the red box (screencap below). And here is our current replacement option, SPC p/n 35109. The original zerked UBJ was SPC p/n 25001 and may be NLA in the near future. I've seen it with anodized-looking finish as shown below, and a grey/matte cast finish. According to @Desert Dog (from the future), [for one or more of the other non-zerk'd UBJ] per SPC tech-support, they can be converted to greaseable w/SPC p/n 25477.

Some UBJ test info from @des2mtn here: https://www.tundras.com/posts/3658517

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