My SPC UCA experience. It's not good.

How often are you supposed to grease the zircs/ball joints on jba control arms? I bought some last week just waiting for them to show up and install. I lifted the front of my taco 3 inches and drives like shit on the freeway. Too much wander and looseness

 

Coupla pumps every oil change otta do.

 

Ok thank you

 

do you have M/T tires? Noticed Mine wandered when I switched to MT from AT

 

I have 285 70 17's fallen at3

 

Love my spc UCA. almost 40k on them with 0 issues.

 

I almost went with spc from Amazon. The only reason I went with jba was the price difference

 

Im around 60k on mine, the ball joints themselves are great, still tight and smooth (and i dont have the easily greased zerk fitting ones, so i grease em maybe every 20k). But the specride bushings were always a pain to keep from squeaking... which i though was remedied by the xAxis joints... but that is not the case.

 

20k miles on my SPC UCAs. No problems.

 

Update: Todd @ SPC is going to get me some replacement arms. Thank you Todd! That being said, everything is on backorder. Might not come in the mail for weeks. I'm going to do the $250 core charge & then drive the defective arms up to their shop to save some postal $$ & get out of Denver. The noise has gotten worse but I'm just thankful they're going to replace them. I do have to say the 1st part of this process was a headache & it really pissed me off. In the end, the alignment is worth it. Not crazy about this experience but hey SPC is going to pull through on this one.

45

 

Hang in there~

 

We came to a very legit agreement that im happy with. Doing a whole arm replacement with a lil bit of cash on top (they have been sitting on my workbench for like almost 2 months, gotta get them in and old ones back to them by beginning of october). I get the new forged one piece arms, new ball joints with greaseable zerks and new (hopefully problem free) xAxis joints for under 100$ all said n done, This will replace my half tube half forged arms, bad xAxis joints, and non greaseable ball joints (that have 60k miles on em, tho still super tight).


I have noticed the xAxis joints that are bad, the clunking gets worse when outside temps are hot and the truck has been running a long time (exhaust manfiolds are right next to em).

 

When my SPC arms were giving me issues, everyplace at the time were out of parts. In the end SPC sent me new arms, but never really trusted them after and no availability of parts. Glad they're making it right for you. Still it doesn't cover the additional alignment cost you'll need to pay for.

 

Realistically you dont need to do any alignment if you set the ball joint the same as the arm coming off.

 

I was hoping of doing this & marking the ball joints but I’ll probably need an alignment in the end....

 

The rotation of the ball is easy at there is only a few positions.

Then the position in the slot is easy with a good ruler.

 

Make sure when you tight-down the long UCA bolt the truck is also not jacked up. It should be tighten on load on the ground. It may have been done but the fact that it goes when when you loosen it had me thinking that.

 

My order through Wheelers is held up because they are waiting on the SPCs. Now I'm wondering if I should swap them out for a different brand. I didn't see the JBAs on their site, consensus on the allpro UCAs? any other suggestions?

 

This is only the case on the first revision many years ago with stock style bonded rubber bushings. Since then, specride and xAxis bushings rotate freely and it doesn't matter if you tighten the uca bolt while drooped.

 

Ran a set on my 17' for a year before it started making noise on stops/starts and turning. Rock the truck side to side and you can hear noise coming from UCA's. Loosened long bolt, noise went away. SPC warrantied a new set of UCA's and it fixed the issue. They said they had a "bad batch" of bushings and most likely that was the problem. Jump 5 months forward to today and the new set with "fixed" bushings is starting to do the same thing again...