“……..Actually I'm going to get the alignment checked on the 57 before I start on the steering box change. The shop I use can't get me in till Wednesday so with luck I'll be able to get a start on that next week………”


Well Wednesday turned into a you got to be kidding me moment (couple of them actually).

So I get to the alignment appointment Wednesday and we get the car up on the rack. In the process of setting everything up we find out the upper ball joints are junk (the loose enough to be scary kind of junk). I knew the steering box is shot, but the car has less than 22,000 on it since I built it including the front suspension. With that few miles on it I didn’t even consider or bother to check the ball joints before I took it in for the alignment.

Anyway we get the car back off the rack and I make another appointment for this week. I knew getting ball joints would not be a problem (Chrysler used the same ball joints from 57 to the late 70s). The parts store actually had a pair on the shelf and Chrysler ball joints just screw in so I figured about an hour to get them changed out.

The hour to get them changed out pretty much turned to crap once I got the car up in the air. It turns out the upper control arm bushings were starting to go away. Now I had check those before the alignment appointment (from the top side). But when I lifted the control arm up to cleat the ball joint stud from the spindle, one of the bushings was starting to lose chunks of rubber.

That really didn’t surprise me too much (I had the same issue on the 57 Dodge I had several years ago). The 57-8 Mopar upper control arm bushings were way too small for the weight of the car and Chrysler re-designed the upper control arms for bigger bushings in 59.

In addition to the bushings being too small, they are a 2 year only application so I suspect productions runs are small and far between, so who knows how old the “new” bushings actually are and how long they have been sitting on the shelf. 10 years ago I could walk into any parts store in town and have a set of bushings by that afternoon…….not so much now. The local parts store has a set coming out of Denver, but they won’t be in till Monday or Tuesday (hopefully).

Oh well, I’ve got a couple of medium sized trees that didn’t make it thru the winter I need to get down and cut into firewood, and I just got in the satellite radio (and installation kits) to add to the Plymouth/Dodge and El Camino. Want to guess what project I’d rather do first???



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