Ever have one of those nights where you go to do a simple repair and by the end of the night you’re thinking, “Man, I should have just paid someone to do this”.
Pre-inspecting the GTO before I took it in for it’s NYS inspection I noticed a little play in the driver’s side outer tie-rod end. Yay GM, a tie rod going bad on an 05 with 18k miles. Probably not enough to fail but I still want it fixed right. Try RockAuto.com, nothing. Napa, Autozone, Advance, same thing. Call the dealer and they have one in stock for great deal of $100.01. Yeah, fuck you GM union made parts, I’m not paying $100 for a simple tie rod end that doesn’t even have a grease fitting. Order up a pair from Kollar Racing for $80 shipped after seeing some good reviews on ls1gto.com (figure I’ll have a spare for when the other side goes) and they arrived at my door yesterday afternoon.
Great, get home, start taking things apart while the wife is making dinner, figure I’ll be done in plenty of time for the Sabres game. Loosen the lug nuts no problem and jack the car up. Jack stand under the frame, 2nd jack under the frame rail as well, first jack under the front cradle mount (I never want to be one of those pancake head corpses who had a 3800lb car fall on me). I spin 3 lugs off by hand and the 4th goes 2 turns real easy then starts to bind. I put the wrench on it and it starts to bind more. Try tightening it, then loosening it, keeps getting worse. Put the breaker bar on and force it off and it chews the shit out of the wheel stud. Still not sure what happened since it was coming off fine at first so I don’t think it was cross threaded. Maybe the lug itself failed.
By this time dinner is ready. I eat quickly and ask the wife to call around and find who has a wheel stud for an 05 GTO in stock and what time they close. I got back out and start hitting the rotor hoping it comes off easy so I have access to the lug. Of course not. About this time the wife comes out and says no one has the lug, that they don’t even show one in the computer. Grrrrr. Smoke starts to come out of my ears. I get lucky though and notice enough of a notch in the back side of the hub that I can knock the bad stud out without removing the rotor. Cool, I won’t have to deal with it and risk damaging my nice DBA 4000 rotor.
So, inside I go, over to ls1gto.com, to see what the deal is with GTO wheel studs and where I can get one in WNY at 6:30pm. I finally find my answer, a NAPA part number that someone was nice enough to do the ground work with a micrometer to cross reference. The part also works on Evo VIII’s. Napaonline.com says the store is open till 8pm, but they’re really open till 7pm. It’s 6:55 and they won’t even pick up the phone, not that I could get there by 7 anyway. 2nd fuck you of the night goes out to Napa.
Quick call to autozone pretending I have an 04 Evo and they have 8 wheel studs in stock. Same store my wife called looking for a GTO wheel stud who said they don’t carry them. I take a lug nut with me, and the damaged stud, and tell the kid at the counter my fake evo/GTO story. He can’t believe his end all be all of automotive knowledge of a computer system could be wrong. I mentally debate beating him with the nearest solid object I can find on the parts counter. Before I can decide, maybe because he can see the mental decision I’m about to make, he retrieves my parts. The evo wheel stud eyeballs up perfectly and the GTO lug nut theads on like butter.
So back to the house, feeling a bit better, I start threading the new lug through the previously discovered gap in the hub. Whoops, it falls. No problem I’ll just try again right? Nope, now it’s stuck at the bottom between the hub and rotor, and this miracle gap is at the top. After 15 minutes of fucking around I manage to thread it back up through the gap. Using some washers, the lug wrench, and the handle of a hammer placed between another lug and the floor to keep the hub from spinning I seat the new stud perfectly. As I back the lug off the rotor falls off. Nice, so that 15 minutes spent threading the lug out of it’s hiding place was time well spent. I curse at the darkness.
Slap the new tie rod on in a couple minutes, button the car back up, clean up, and I drop down on the couch just in time to see the Sabres 2nd goal. The wife complains that I smell of nasty penetrating oil. I decide to pass on some crude penetrating joke.
Cliffs:
15 minute job turns into a couple hours and some internet sleuthing for part cross referencing.
