OK, I'm not sure if this is my LCA or what, I'm not as familiar with the suspension parts as many of you are. The cracks talked about in this thread appear primarily to be around the shock attach point. Looked this up on Xterraparts and they describe the part pictured below as a "link". This is on the driver's side, looking towards the back of the truck. The yellow in the background is my front driver's side shock. I'm counting on the fact that many of you will recognize exactly where this is, if not I'll take and post a wider shot for perspective.

In normal light, i.e. you just stick your head under the truck and look, it's looks as if there might be a crack. But when I took flash pics, you couldn't really see anything. I finally turned the flash off to get this shot where you can see what I'm talking about.

My truck is a 2002 SE 4x2 that I bought new. It has about 68K miles and has not really been off-road other than fire roads and such, nothing hard-core at all.

Any ideas about what's up with this, and what if anything to do about it?

Looks like your sway bar mount is cracked. Same thing happened to Brian(Ramness)only his ripped totally out. I believe it happened twice on his.

so are we solely talking the ball joint as the dangerous area? Or the shock mount, and or the ball joint areas?

I am replacing the lower ball joints saturday so I need to pay attention to that. I can weld them up and gussett them no problem, I guess I should get on that.

If the shock mount rips out you're not going to crash. If the balljoint area rips out, the spindle mounting point fails, the wheel goes up into the fender well, and if you're going fast, it's gonna hurt.

Looking at my post above, can you help me understand which of those applies to my X? Appears to be the ball joint area but I want to be sure.

ETA: Also, are there repair alternatives to replacing that entire piece?

The big fat nut/bolt in the center of your picture looks to be the one that holds the front leg of of the LCA to the frame. The lower ball joint is out at the wheel knuckle toward the right in your pic. There's a big stud bolt pointing down through the bottom of that knuckle toward the ground with a cotter pin on it. The top of that stud is your lower ball joint which is pressed into the metal of the Lower Control Arm (lower link, LCA). Your wheel pivots left/right on that ball joint stud and the upper ball joint stud. The LCA pivots up/down on that big old bolt in the middle of your picture and on the one going from your torsion bar mount through the frame and the back leg of the LCA. I can't quite tell from the picture if you've really got any cracking or tearing going on by that mounting point shown in your picture. It looks like weld bugars and some scoring from the LCA rotating up and down.

The bracket where the shock attaches to the top of your LCA is a weak spot if you wheel much. The shocks tend to limit the LCA travel in both the up and down directions. Drop the wheel in a hole or off a rock a couple thousand times and the shock mount starts to give and rips out of the LCA.

The things to watch for are cracks around that shock bracket and out toward the wheel where the ball joint is pressed in to the LCA.

(ETA: the picture)

Update: I recently brought my truck for a front brake job and asked the shop, who I trust, to take a look at this. They stated it's not a crack, just the way the joint looks. Nothing to worry about.

I'm good with that, considering 1) as explained in my previous post, it looks like nothing from some angles, it's only when you get the light just right that it looks iffy, and 2) even if it wasn't a crack, they could easily have said, "Yeah, it's a crack" and collected whatever the replacement cost is. So assuming they're competent, and from all appearance they are, I'm not going to worry about it.

Well since its back at the top why not share my crack...

Read this topic and flew under my X right away. No cracks, but raised some questions for me.

1) Noticed while I was looking, my LCA's are "boxed". We used to do this years ago, and it would have been my answer here. Is this stil the affected LCA?

2) I'm new to X's... Where doeas Gen.1 end? Mine's an '04. Is this Gen.1 or Gen.2?

Just trying to catch up. Thanx.

Jeff!

1st Gen

The cracks develop around where the lower ball joint is pressed in.