By Glenn Goodspeed (August, 1997)
I finally took my own advice on the lower ball joints. My '63 P1800 had been steering harder and harder the past few years, especially in the heat of summer.
I remember the last time this happened. I had to pick up my wife one hot summer afternoon at the airport a year or two after I bought the car. It was a terribly frustrating experience for two reasons. First, the car resisted every effort to steer it. Second, I could not find the right terminal. I went to the terminal identified by the telephone flight information recording, but no sign of her, so I looked at the TV monitor with flight listings, and I swear to this day that it said her flight was arriving at the next terminal.
If you haven't been to Dallas/Fort Worth airport, you have to understand the layout. There are six terminals shaped like horseshoes, three on either side of the highway running straight through them all. To get to any terminal, you have to drive around two ramps that complete near-360-degree turns before passing the gate area. If you want to park in a lot near the gate, you have to make several more very tight turns before you finally find a space.
This should be fun, right? In a sports car designed to take turns with alacrity, even esprit, one could play here all day and enjoy it. Not so with my Volvo this day. The steering seemed to get harder the more I worked the turns. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, I was getting a sweaty workout.
I arrived at the terminal suggested by the TV monitor, twisting and turning and fighting the wheel all the way, only to find ... nothing. No flight, no wife. I was starting to get irritated. I walked back out to the car and muscled it through another set of equally laborious turns until I arrived back at the original terminal, rather hot in various unpleasant senses of the word.
This was at least forty-five minutes after the flight had arrived, and of course she was waiting, tapping her foot, looking, I suppose, no less angry than I. I made the required apology, explained as best I could, and off we went home, me wrestling the balky machine all the way and promising myself to look into the steering the next day.
Look at it I did, thoroughly. Over a period of several weeks, I poked, tapped and tested every component of the steering system - center, left and right links, column and wheel, ball joints and steering box.
The steering box was full of chassis grease. A quick look at the Haynes manual assured me this was wrong. The box should be full of SAE 80 oil. I ordered a set of seals for the box, and when they arrived, I disassembled it, removed all the grease, installed new seals, and filled it with oil. This was a lot of work, and I was rightly pissed when it did nothing to improve the steering.
By now it was October and the weather was getting cooler. This is the time of year when I get the urge to drive just for the joy of driving. In spite of the hard steering, I took off one Saturday for the country and did a little barnstorming around the ranches. Then something strange happened. I came upon a curvaceous, newly-graveled road, and, remembering hilarious low-speed antics on gravel roads in the VW of my youth (driving on gravel at 30 mph is like driving on pavement at 100), I took off up this one with gusto.
All of a sudden, the steering was healed. I couldn't believe it. I could drive with one finger, no problem. Somehow, I knew this held the key to the steering problem. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the ball joints were the problem. For one thing, I had replaced or repaired almost everything else.
I recalled a technical discussion I once read about how the wheels of a car interact with the road, especially how steering increases the force on the tire surface and suspension components. As long as the wheels are pointed straight ahead, there is little resistance to motion. Turn the wheels, and the car still wants to go straight ahead, producing much more force on the wheels and steering linkage.
I got to thinking about those ball joints feeling all that force, and how over time they must be worn in a certain pattern. I began to think that if you changed the amount of force significantly, maybe those ball joints would be free of the wear pattern and would work like new under those conditions. The gravel road experience seemed to bear this out. I installed new lower ball joints, and poof! like magic, the steering was fixed.
So, last year, several summers and 70,000 miles later, the steering got very hard again. Aha, thought I, time for new lower ball joints. But other things demanded my time and money more urgently, and then winter came and the steering got a little better with the cold. But I knew this summer the time had come, and IPD's sale on ball joints left me no excuse, so I did it again, and with the same gratifying results. In fact, it's such a dramatic difference that a week later I still find myself oversteering embarrassingly, trying to fight steering that is no longer pugnacious.
The second time for any mechanical repair is always easier. I already had the necessary tool, a funny-looking thing sold by J.C. Whitney as catalog number 88DT1770B, called a screw-type ball joint remover. This tool forces the stem of the ball joint out of the steering knuckle. You have to cudgel it some if it tries to slip off, but it does the job.
My mainstay, the Haynes manual, is almost useless for this operation. Mr. Haynes was not looking at an 1800 when he wrote the procedure. Judging from the photos, I'd say he was not looking at a Volvo 122, either. Oh, well, you can figure it out yourself. All you have to do is jack up the lower A-frame enough to get the wheel off, loosen the top nut on the ball joint, undo the four bolts holding the ball joint to the A-frame, use the funny tool, and you've got the old one out.
Make sure you put some grease in the new ball joint before installing. The very best way to do this is to use a grease needle. This is like a large hypodermic needle with a grease fitting on the back end. You can get one at any decent auto supply store. Just hook it up to your grease gun (you have a grease gun, right?) and squirt grease into the top of the rubber boot on the ball joint until you can feel it through the rubber.
After you're done installing the new ball joints, you might want to use the grease needle to renew the grease in the tie rod ends and center link ends. Just stick it right through the rubber boots. That's why they made it sharp. Unless you have a later 1800 with sealed upper ball joints, you should remove the needle and use the grease fitting to lubricate these.
As always when you change any front-end parts, the job is not complete until the front end is aligned. Yes, you can do this yourself, too, with an Ang-U-Liner from J.C. Whitney and a lot of patience, but that's another story. If you take the car to a shop for alignment, be sure to copy the camber, caster and toe-in figures from the Haynes manual for the shop to use. Believe me, they don't have the specs for an 1800. If they look at the car and say, "We don't do them," don't argue, just go somewhere else.