joojar
Active Member
- Posts
- 158
- Location
- Derbyshire
I replaced me front ARB links a few weeks back, and thought I'd try some super-cheap ones off eBay for s**ts and giggles, these ones: Land Rover Discovery Mk2 Front Left or Right Drop Link | eBay
Trouble was, I couldn't get the axle-end nuts up to 100Nm before the threads stripped, so I thought I'd try with the 50Nm I got and see what happened...
...and what happened was the clonking I was trying to fix got worse. Crawling under with a crowbar, everything seemed solid, including the fixings with the under-torqued nuts.
More driving, more clonking, more crawling around. Many times over.
Eventually, I twigged it back to the under-torqued nuts. What was happening was that the under-torqued nuts were tight enough to survive axial prying with a crowbar, but they did not apply enough friction to the joint to stop lateral movement, and that was the cause of the clonk.
In the end, I got some different links from Paddocks and realised when they were side by side that the issue with the cheap eBay ones is the thickness of the nuts. The cheap ones have Nylock nuts that are thinner (with fewer threads to engage), so I obtained some thicker 12mm Nylock nuts (they look 2x thicker by eye) and had no trouble hitting the 100Nm torque with the cheap eBay links.
The lessons I learnt, in no particular order:
- the workshop manual torques are chosen for a reason
- an under-torqued axle-end ARB link nut can be a source of suspension clonking that is difficult to isolate with a crowbar crawl
- isolating a loose suspension part can be tricksy. You need to apply lots of force to each joint, and in all possible directions of failure in turn
- those cheap link arms off eBay might be OK, if you use them with a thicker nut
- but to an extent, you get what you pay for
- I now have one spare link arm
Anyone else managed to make this simple job as complicated as I did?
I am now mercifully clonk-free, and as it turns out just in time for MOT
Trouble was, I couldn't get the axle-end nuts up to 100Nm before the threads stripped, so I thought I'd try with the 50Nm I got and see what happened...
...and what happened was the clonking I was trying to fix got worse. Crawling under with a crowbar, everything seemed solid, including the fixings with the under-torqued nuts.
More driving, more clonking, more crawling around. Many times over.
Eventually, I twigged it back to the under-torqued nuts. What was happening was that the under-torqued nuts were tight enough to survive axial prying with a crowbar, but they did not apply enough friction to the joint to stop lateral movement, and that was the cause of the clonk.
In the end, I got some different links from Paddocks and realised when they were side by side that the issue with the cheap eBay ones is the thickness of the nuts. The cheap ones have Nylock nuts that are thinner (with fewer threads to engage), so I obtained some thicker 12mm Nylock nuts (they look 2x thicker by eye) and had no trouble hitting the 100Nm torque with the cheap eBay links.
The lessons I learnt, in no particular order:
- the workshop manual torques are chosen for a reason
- an under-torqued axle-end ARB link nut can be a source of suspension clonking that is difficult to isolate with a crowbar crawl
- isolating a loose suspension part can be tricksy. You need to apply lots of force to each joint, and in all possible directions of failure in turn
- those cheap link arms off eBay might be OK, if you use them with a thicker nut
- but to an extent, you get what you pay for
- I now have one spare link arm
Anyone else managed to make this simple job as complicated as I did?
I am now mercifully clonk-free, and as it turns out just in time for MOT
