Leaky ball joint

I have a 3rd gen (2017) Tacoma with 45, 765 miles on it. While doing my oil change I noticed my driver side lower ball joint was leaking grease from the bottom of the boot. It's saturating the castle nut, but it's been like 100+ degrees here. I jacked up the lower control arm and had a pry bar under the tire, I had my girlfriend video tape the ball joint and control arm while I lifted the pry bar. I couldn't see any real vertical slop between the ball joint and the lca. So I don't think the ball joint has failed, I did some searching on the forums and came across a lot of different opinions on replacing these, some say they have the same issue and have been fine for a while as is, some say to replace the ball joints with OEM even though Toyota doesn't sell just the ball joints by themselves, some say to get moog, some say don't. I also ran across the idea of just getting a grease gun needle and pumping grease into the joint and then using RTV to cover the insertion hole. I'm a worried about the leaking as I have to commute 160 miles a week now going through mountain passes for school for the next 2-3 months, I don't have the time and money to just replace with OEM lca's. I'm thinking of going with the whole greasing them up and dealing with it after school. Any opinions/suggestions on this?

 

If you've suitably tested the ball joint and it's still good then I wouldn't worry about this at all. And definitely not an immediate (2-3 months) concern.

Majority of the time a ball joint boot will fail first before the joint itself. That busted boot can then lead to faster wear on the joint from less grease and/or intrusion of debris/moisture. Every situation will be different. I've had joints that last many years and 10's of thousands of miles after a boot starts leaking. Usually I've just ended up replacing them to solve the boot issue but the joint has been fine still.

I've got busted ball joint boots on both our daily driver Hondas right now (was surprised the boots were gone at only 70-80k mi) and replacing them is on my to do list but it's a low priority. The joints themselves are just fine so I'm keeping an eye on them and will probably do a big suspension refresh on each car within the next year or so.

 

Ya if you have no play and see no rips then i'd say it's just sweating. I wouldn't even worry about adding lube as typically sealed ball joints use a special grease so adding your own could lead to compatibility issues.

Down the road if you have to replace ball joints, 555 Senkei is OEM. I tried Mevotech TTX and less than 3 months in the boots on both separated from the ball shell. Maybe it was a bad production run but when I put the 555 Senkei's in that I got from my local dealership it's been fine ever since