Upper Control Arm Question

[RRoller123]

I have a question on the upper control arm. I just installed new upper (and lower) control arms and torqued them down properly and after driving the car about 100 miles I decided to jack it up and check all the mounting points, etc for proper tightness. I noticed that the upper control arm bolt (a through bolt) was still torqued properly, but if I put a wrench on the end, it can twist fairly easily. This seems odd to me, I think if my memory serves me well, that the torque was 65 ft-lbs or somewhere in that range, and I am surprised that the bolt can spin so easily at this tightness. Anyone else have this observation? Not sure what is up with this?

[azruss]

what you may be doing is twisting the bushing. not a good idea to twist it beyond its normal 10 degrees or so normal travel.

[RRoller123]

No what I mean is that if you put a wrench on the end of the bolt, either end, it spins pretty easily, not stressing/twisting the bushings. Bushings stay put. I am wondering if the threads have bottomed out before it is hitting the proper torque? Can't easily take it apart to see now that it is all installed. I guess tomorrow I will stack up a bunch of SS Washers and see if it makes any difference.

[RRoller123]

Well today I added (3) SS 14mm washers on the end of the bolt and torqued it back up and the bolt is now clearly more rigidly held in place and quite difficult to rotate. The car handles slightly noticeably better. I can only surmise that the threads on the bolt don't extend quite far enough and that the nut bottoms out at the end of the threaded portion and therefore the bushings aren't compressed enough before torque is reached. I would be very interested to hear if anyone else has this experience?

[RRoller123]

OK, got some input from one of our suppliers and want to share this as it is quite important. It seems that the shock towers can narrow down ("crush" is probably too extreme a term) over time from stress, and cause the nut on the top control arm to bottom out and appear to be torqued properly (65ft-lbs) when it is not. And be aware that the towers on my '80 do not show any evidence of dimensional change whatsoever to the naked eye, and they have absolutely NO rust. So I will make it a regular point in the future to check for ease of spin of the mounting bolt after torqueing it down. Once corrected, by adding (3) 14mm SS Washers to the stack, I noticed that the car was more stable and the front end a little quieter.

[dmwhiteoak]

This is good to know. I will check mine today as I still have a noise coming from the right front even after a rebuild.
Thanks Pete

[RRoller123]

Hold the phone.. There is more to the story. I am working with one of our vendors to compare new to old parts and see if there has been a hardware (bolt) change. Will report soon. I measured my shock towers and they are NOT crushed, so there is another cause of the problem. I too had a small noise that was eliminated when I added the washers and re-torqued.

[Ramzi]

Peter,


Thank you for making us aware of this issue. As a direct importer of these and many other parts, we are truly grateful for feedback of any sort from our customers. This sort of information will only help our entire Fiat community in the long run. And rather than blaming it on some sort of improbable failure of the horizontal sleeve inside the shock tower (which BTW neither of us have never seen in 25 years)... we are addressing the issue head on.

We have tentatively confirmed that there is an issue with the thread length on bolts which are supplied with our most recent import batch of upper control arms. These control arms are manufactured by Vema S.p.A. - one of the only remaining sources of Fiat 124 control arms in the world. We strongly believe that several other vendors sell or have imported these arms in the past 6 months as well.

We have contacted Vema in Italy about this issue. Once we have an answer from them we will pass it along to everyone.

Both Csaba and I strongly urge you contact your supplier if you have purchased a new upper control arm in the past 6 months and ask them for their input and assistance resolving any issue which may arise. We feel that being proactive about this sort of issue can only result in a higher quality of part for our Fiat customers.

Ramzi Gillespie

[Ramzi]

What we have determined is that there may be an issue with the mounting bolt supplied with the latest import batch of A-Arm. These bolts (the ones which pass through the shock tower) are manufactured with a shoulder which is 1.5-2.0mm longer than OE. This translates into 2-3 threads. As a result, we have had cases of customers reporting that the nut bottomed out on the shank (non-threaded portion) resulting in a perceived false torque.

In each case, our customers resolved the issue on their own buy installing an extra washer.

That all said, the customers who have experienced this issue only represent 3% of the total volume we have sold this year... Our sincere feeling is that these are isolated cases... and possible the result of minor chassis differences as well.

As with every do it yourself project, we recommend our customers re-examine their work after a few miles. We have spent a tremendous amount of effort making certain that the products we sell are safe for our families before we will allow your family to use them.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly.



Ramzi
Auto Ricambi, LLC
http://AutoRicambi.us

[RRoller123]

Good work, thanks for following through thoroughly on this issue! We are really advantaged here to have a conscientious vendor such as AutoRicambi in the mix.

The installation can be checked after torquing up by putting a wrench on the bolt head and seeing if the whole tightened bolt assembly rotates easily or is difficult to rotate. Mine rotated too easily, something clearly was off, and the addition of a few (I arbitrarily used 3) 14mm SS washers did the trick. If the bolt shoulder is about 2mm long (~0.080") the washers take up that distance and allow the bolt to be properly torqued.

[giuliot60]

This is great information. I am eventually going to redo my front suspension and going to replace the upper A-arms.

This is why this site is so valuable.

Thanks all.

[fiesta54]

I know this is a bit late but I just did my control arm as well and noticed a similar issue. All parts came from international auto parts.

[blurple124]

Throw washers on the bolt or use the original. I did the latter, both work.