So, ill start off with a summary. I bought my x last year with 205,000kms or 127k miles. I redid almost the entire front suspension, compression rods, lower control arms, sway bar links and bushings, upper control arms.

Last week i felt a clunk and was noticing for a while that my steering was kind of sloppy and vague. Jacked it up and found my right upper control arm was bad again. Just replaced it last weekend. Steering feel seemed relatively back to normal. But i still felt a slight clunk on the right side. Jacked up again and i still have lots of play if i hold the wheel at 12 and 6. So, i checked and it seems that the lower knuckle ball joint is bad.

Now, i read after research it only comes as the whole spindle which is a bit ridiculous. I looked further and it seems people have had success with duralast bjl148 joints with the factory shim/cone.

Now, my trouble lies with the fact i simply cannot find that part. I live in canada and we dont have that brand here. Anyone know if theres a cross reference or what other balljoint will fit properly on the x without issues?

I tried googling interchange numbers and stuff but even those come up as "out of stock". I tried typing bjl148 into ebay.ca and the only thing that comes up are mevotech ms30500 and im not sure if those will fit either.

Thanks!

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Using the Mevotech online parts finder catalog I came up with these ones for the lower front AWD.

https://partsonline.mevotech.com/details/MS30506

I try to stay away from Duracrap, they aren't actually built to last, duralast.

 

Thanks! Yeah apparently some people who bought them said the duralast were just repackaged oem ball joints with "made in japan" on em. But who knows.

Im not so happy with mevotech if my upper one failed alread, but hey, at least its got grease fittings. I may try to order those if i can and see what happens.

 

A lot of these companies are big GLOBAL companies, they have manufacturing facilities in different regions to serve the locality, for example Moog which is a very reputable brand manufactures parts in over a dozen countries across the globe. They have Chinese plants, US plants, German plants, etc. Each designated to deliver parts to it's region, however those parts can literally end up ANYWHERE on the globe due to the way global manufacturing works.

If they made a massive run on ball joints that are sitting backlogged in one locality they can easily toss them on a freighter with other goods and ship them out to a different locale. Normally this wouldn't be done because packaging would be different but who's to stop a 3rd party vendor from buying a bunch of Moog ball joints at a screaming deal in China and sending them off to a more profitable location.

Mevotech has a decent reputation as an entry level replacement, certainly not on the same level as OEM but you should still expect about 75% of the normal life out of the part unless it was defective or improperly installed. However only getting a YEAR out of an upper ball joint means something was definitely wrong, I'm guessing there was no grease in it.

 

Yup i believe that to be the case as well with there being no grease in there. I made sure i pumped in some grease to my new one, and my passenger side since it was done at the same time and still ok.

Ill probably end up ordering these and poppin em in. Hopefully all goes smooth! The roads here in my town in northern ontario are worse than trash. Like they are absolute utter garbage. Try to dodge as many bumps and potholes as i can but you can only do so much.