P30 Disc brake vs drum brake ball joints

Gjac wrote:
This is a very serious issue. I had two failures due to a shop installing the wrong ball joints. The first failure was entering an interstate in Ohio rounding a corner at 20 mph and the left ball joint failed and the whole front end dropped. After it was fixed the shop back in Ct had to do additional work and replaced the correct ball joints with the undersized ones. The second failure was rounding a corner in Montana at 60 mph and the RH ball joint failed, I thought the MH was going to flip over but I managed to stop it safely. The was no warning sounds of clunking just a sudden failure and the whole front end just dropped. The lighter P-30's have drum brakes in the rear, the heavier ones have disc brakes in the rear. After much research I had the shop in MT. replace the ball joint with Moog parts. The confusion for the person who orders the parts is the ball joints listed under the rear drum brakes say HD so they think it is stronger not realizing the ball joint is undersize. The difference is P-30's with rear drum brakes get one part number and P30's with rear disc brakes get another part number.

I cant beleive these ball joints didnt fail like you described. They were clunking for over a year and nobody believed me. It appears that the lower ball joint can be pretty bad and still hold together thru gravity, but the upper ball joint would allow the control arms to seperate and be more catastrophic. That whole front end on these is under built.