Ball joints up side down??

[1970 CST Short Wide]

My son has a 01 Silverado. He bought it already lowered and is a nice truck. The problem is with front tire wear, when he had an alignment done the guy told him his ball joints are in up side down and the A arms are switched side to side???? Has any one ever heard of this for lowering a late model truck?

[Palf70Step]

That sounds weird?!?! I can see having the arms switched, but not on purpose?

I am confused, hopefully the more learned will inform us.

[truckdude239]

never heard of it t each sid eshouldn't be interchangeable as far as i know

[RunninLo]

sadly I have heard of this. In addition to being swapped driver for passenger they should also be upsidedown. The arm has a slight bend up in it right before the area where the BJ is installed. On lowered applications with the arm angled up more than stock that bend can cause the ball joints to bind sooner.
The "cheap" fix is to flip the arms as described so now that bend is down thus alowing the upper arm to acheive a more upward angle before binding the ball joint.
Obviously the correct way to fix this is with an aftermarket arm or high angle ball joint.
Sometimes just because you "can" doesn't mean you "should"

Josh

[1970 CST Short Wide]

Thanks Josh
Like I said he bought it this way. Looks like we'll be buying some new front end parts very soon. It didn’t look right to me when he showed it to me and from what you’ve told me it doesn’t sound safe. I wish I would have known this before he bought it. He's had it over a year; I guess he's lucky he hasn’t lost a ball joint or worse.

Thanks for the info

[RunninLo]

well in practice it's not the worst thing. The ball joints still function normally and have their strength. All other facets of the suspension are functioning normally. While the engineers at GM never designed the arm to work that way as long as you don't overload the front end it should be fine. If you can find an open minded alignment tech to get it into spec for tire wear purposes and you don't notice excessive bump steer or other ill effects it should work fine until a more suitible solution can be implemented.

Basically while it's not ideal it is better than binding the ball joint and there's no need to park the truck in the mean time.

Josh