156 upper wishbone

[tuscan_thunder]

Easy to change?


Huge amount of play in the wheel which, I believe, is traced to the bush in the upper arm.

right hand side one if it makes any difference.

I have the AlfaWorkshop guide printed off.

[maddog993]

Upper wishbone was pretty straightforward - lower arm much less so (as I remember from my identically suspensioned 147 when 'powerflexing' it)

[exgtt]

The below has been shamelessley copyied and pasted from alfaowner.com!

http://www.alfaowner.com/Forum/alfa-147-156-and-gt...

Upper Arm
So you have that "eek eek eek" as you go down the road that sounds like it is coming from behind the dashboard in the right hand corner? It is very likely to be your upper front suspension arms ball joint! These are cheap to replace (I got mine for £29.20 + VAT from EB Spares), and fairly straight forward to do - but not as simple as you might think!

1) Raise the car, support safetly, and remove the wheel.
2) The upper arm has a long bolt that it pivots on, and the small balljoint that connects to upper arm to the upright. That is all that keeps it in place.
3) Take of the 15mm nut that holds the balljoint to the upright.
4) Surely if you just take out that long bolt, and undo the balljoint, it is a straight swap of the arm right???? WRONG! It is more involved then that...
5) No matter how much you want it to be so, that long bolt has not got enough room to slide all the way out so the arm will come off without doing some work to make enough space. Some say the bolt will just pull out after you take the nut off, but I really beg to differ! (On mine the nut was facing the spring, bolthead facing the door). To make the space you will need to lower the strut/damper/spring by a) undoing the long bolt that joins the strut to the lower arm, and b) lifting the bonnet and undoing the 4 nuts that are at the top of the wheel arch (they may have black plastic covers on them) at the top of the strut.
6) With the strutt/spring loose it will (carefully) drop down in the wheel arch, and you will be able to rotate the whole assembly around and have enough space to get that 17mm socket on the long bolt to attack it properly and pull it out. Now you can put the new arm on put the long bolt back in. Reverse the above procedure and you are home free!
7) Act smug that you did it yourself.

[wrinx]

That's more or less how I did it (both times!), plus standing on the brake disc to "persuade" the strut down far enough to get the upper wishy out!

wrinx

[sjg]

Should be - I was billed two hours labour to change both front upper wishbones, and a general check of all suspension bits.

[tuscan_thunder]

Did it yesterday (before I saw any of the posts here!).

Wasn't too difficult: the old arm will come out without removing the roll bar link (it was looking like it'd split or round off if it was attacked) but you need to jack up the other side of the car to allow the suspension to droop fully. Other than that just followed the guides.

Splitting the old bush off the long bolt (it came out with the bolt rather than remaining in the wishbone) was the most awkward bit actually. A bit of heat and a touch with the grinder to split the bush lengthways sorted that.