Ball joint broke on the highway....help....

Yeah, I see that it is. New shocks in my future. Right now just want to get it home.

 

Cheaper than the tow truck was....

 

So, while I'm waiting for parts........any idea WHY toyota made so many trucks over several models like this? What was the perceived advantage of upside down ball joints?

 

Interesting. That's what I have on my '00.

I'm glad you have an order placed and will get back on the road soon enough

 

I don't think anyone on here can give an exact answer on why Toyota did what they did, but they did fix this in the next generation models for affected vehicles where the LBJ is under compression. This was the first and only generation where the LBJs are under tension, prior to that the trucks had a torsion bar setup where the LBJ is under compression.

It was likely cheaper for them to continue using the inferior under tension design and eat recall costs until the the next generation came out, rather than spend a bunch of money to change to a compression design on a generation that will be phased out in a couple of years anyways.

 

I'm just wondering why Japanese engineer, normally brilliant folks, thought they would design a suspension joint that was always trying to tear itself apart under normal conditions, rather than trying to push itself together. I can't imagine it was arbitrary...there must have been some advantage in theory.

 

Just out of curiosity, were any of the 4 bolts loose when you removed the LBJ?

 

They're still bitter about ww2.

 

My 98 Tacoma broke down on me exactly once, and the tow bill was $600. After that I got AAA. I haven't personally needed it since, but I saved my friend probably $600-1,000 when I was with him out on the Blackfoot and he hit a tree and busted his radiator. At $100/year, well worth it for me.

 

The driver I rode with went to school for engineering and worked in the mining industry for a few years, then decided he could make more and enjoy life more as a tow truck driver.

 

They've made a few dumb mistakes over the years. The rust. Different places, but rust has been a Toyota truck problem since the 70s. Then the years of first gen Tacoma and Tundra frame rust. Same generation with the LBJ issue. Who knows.

 

No. All were pretty tight and hard to bust loose.

 

So examining the broken surface closely....and looking up the failure modes of bolts in an old metallurgy book, it appears what happened to me was classic metal fatigue. The bolt surface shows the classic 'beach' marks of it.

A crack started in the past, long enough ago for the cracked surface to oxidize, and then much more recently the crack started to spread rapidly through the bolt until it had cut through about 7/8ths of the bolt thickness, before tearing away completely at the end from simple stress.

 

Did I miss pics of that? I think the only thing this site’s missing on LBJ failures at this point is like an expert metallurgist’s microscopic tests on failure.