I've been doing some reading and hearing about how much of a PITA the upper control arm pinch bolt is going to be, so I figured I'd let someone else do it. Unfortunately the repair shop quoted me a price of $150 per side to replace my wheel bearing- and that was with me providing the parts. I just don't have it in my budget for that since I have to buy tires this week too.

So in a sort of fit of rage I began tearing into this last night around 7:30pm. I was able to free up everything but the devil bolt in about an hour.

At this point I cant help but imagine how good it would feel to get my hands around the throat of the idot who thought it was a good idea to design these parts this way. Maybe the Adui engineers were sitting around thinking "how could we make this more difficult? Ahh, I know... let's put a pinch bolt in so that there will be a better possibility of dirt and water resting in the cracks and creveses so the f'er will basicly fuse itself to the knuckle when it rust." And then, to be sure they could hinder any work-around, they also figured it would be a good idea to attach one of the uppper control arms in such a fashion that it can not be removed unless the complete upper mounting bracket is removed. But I suppose I should have suspected such a thing from a manufacture who decided it was necessary to put four control amrs per side with ball joints that are not serviceable... anyways, I'm done ranting about it.

I went back out at 5:30am this morning and beat on them a little more...soaked them in more PB Blaster... beat on them some more, then came back inside to get ready to go to my job. I'll be back at it tonight when I get home for round two...

Just thought I'd share

 

yea.. that is probably the stupidest thing they did on the car

you should have heard the things that i was saying about them like two weeks ago

there is really no way of getting the ball joints out without taking the bolt out, and there is no way to take the bolt out without destroying it

 

Wow i cant wait till i get to do that

 

its something on every car it seems...at least u cant DIY!

i cant understand why the b6s dont have adjustable upper control arms... im sure audi didnt plan for us all to lower these things

good luck! im about due for a CV boot [:@]they arent much fun for us b6ers

 

ahhhh yes, did my cv boot a couple weeks ago. hammered, drilled, torched, pb blasted, air chiseled that thing and got no where. i ended up giving up after 4 days of trying and got it towed to a local european specialty shop. i have done them before, and read the horror stories from everyone else, and honestly i thinki had the absolute worst case so far.

worst part was that was on the S4 which only has 62k on it...

 

are u up north? maybe the salt on the roads makes it worse?

mine doesnt look rusted or anything but its got 70k on it....

 

thats whats misleading about it.. i looked at mine and was going, "awesome its not rusted or anything, this will be a breeze"

6 hours later sitting in a pile of air tools hammers, sockets torches going "son of a bitch"

 

Few suggestions.......

Hit the thing with a torch for a while to cook off the corrosion, then pound around the housing with a hammer

Put the car on jackstands. Then, use your floor jack to lift up the suspension components some instead of letting it hang all the way down, and try removing it then.

Good luck.

 

An update:

While at work I had my father stop and spray some more PB Blaster on the offending bolt. When I finally got home after work I beat on it some more and pondered my options. In case you didn't catch it I'm just replacing the wheel bearing- not ready to do control arms yet so I'm trying to avoid putting heat on there in fear of damaging a boot on a ball joint. I decided to remove the upper strut mount so that I could remove the control arms from that bracket. This at least allowed me to remove the knuckle from the car so I can work on it at the bench. But now I'm tired so I'm calling it quits for now. Retired father is taking them somewhere tomorrow to have the new bearings pressed in (and hopefully get those PITA bolts out while he's there). Total time working on it so far is 3 hours and I suspect I should be able to reassemble everything for both side in about another hour. Crossing my fingers and hoping that the dealership has the devil bolts in stock... I'll be liberally coating the bolts with anti-seize when they go back in. Never know how much more time I have until control arms need done....

 

Ok, one down- one to go.

So while I'm letting some PB Blaster soak into the one that's being a bitch I was sidetracked and started cleaning a control arm up...
http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...g?t=1192067189

but then I noticed something....
http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...g?t=1192067215
does this look like a problem? How about this:
http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...g?t=1192067255

As I mentioned before I'm not in a budget to replace control arms. This would be the front control arm, upper back. I check the left side and it looks bad too but not as bad as this one. Were there any recalls on these control arms for any known defects? How about new bushings? The ball joint seems good and it appears that these bushings are pressed in so I was thinking they should make new ones right?

Any comments?