Are my upper control arms unusable now? 1973 Dart.
I'm slowly catching up with my detractors. If these people are triggered by someone on a forum who won't post pictures, then God help their loved ones that might inadvertently cross them.
I'll get these suspension parts beautifully restored to OEM and installed back on my Dart. Then I'll take pictures that ya'll crave so much, and ya'll can eat crow. Stay tuned for that, haha.
I'm on the TurboDodge and For B bodies only forums occasionally because I'm restoring an '85 Laser and a '67 Coronet respectively and I've never had this much fun.
And lastly, I won't waste your time anymore. Simply stay away from this thread and dont help me. Not that your post had anything that resembled help. Rant over and out, brosephine.
Please. This whole thread is about your mistake, your lack of knowledge and experience to make a good decision, and you wanting us to make you feel good about yourself. I'll sum this up.
You made a dumb mistake. It happens, we've all been there. But you lack the knowledge/experience to have the confidence to do what you want, which is just run the control arms anyway.
So, you asked a bunch of
random strangers on the internet and gave them
NO useful information, hoping you'd just get a bunch of people to blindly agree with you so you could feel good about yourself (even if its the wrong choice).
Instead, you actually got some people that have knowledge and experience, and they wanted to
HELP you get the
RIGHT answer. But since you provided no useful information at all, those people asked questions so they could actually help you make the RIGHT choice. Because not all bent control arms are the same- some can be fixed, some can't, and some shouldn't be.
So what did you do? You got angry, because you'd have to admit how dumb your mistake was, or maybe reveal how extensive your lack of knowledge is. And of course, you might not get the answer you want to hear even if it is the right answer.
Sorry, but we were actually trying to HELP you, not just make you feel good about yourself. Everything I told you was true, it's too bad you just want to feel good about yourself instead of doing a good job.
I don't see nothing bent in pictures? Not sure which side is suspected to be bent? So guess put it together, see if bushing fits in frame correctly, see if it aligns?
Exactly. Someone that knows what they're doing would continue to remove the old shells (more carefully). Then clean and inspect the control arm closely with the old bushing shells removed to see if there's any visible damage. And then, if there isn't any visible damage, press in the new bushings and see if they fit and line up like they're supposed to.
Unfortunately, he doesn't want to make the effort to do all that and find out he's wrong because he doesn't understand
why he needs to do that.