OP
This morning, I took off the wheels, again,
and removed the bent tie rod.
It went much easier than I expected.
Anointing the lug nuts and tie rod ends
with PB Blaster every day
for the previous few days may have helped.
Using a digital bathroom scale
that measures to the nearest half pound
I learned two things.
First, the OE tie rod weighs about 4 pounds.
Second, I need to lose weight.
This picture shows how much the fender bender
bent the skinny OE tie rod.
The Rough Country tie rod from Extreme Terrain
weighs about 8 pounds.
It has proper flats to use a real wrench
instead of a pipe wrench
and jam nuts instead of dinky clinch bolts.
A solid bit of kit, it is. But wait, there's more.
The instructions said a silver right hand jam nut
and a black left hand jam nut were included.
The two nuts in the plastic bag were both silver,
so I approached the next step with caution.
(Don't get ahead of me here.)
Careful trial and error and inspection
determined that neither nut was left hand.
Fortunately, I determined that fact before
fuzzing up the threads on the ball joint.
While I was at it, I decided to identify
the left hand end of the 8 pound tie rod
and check the threads on the ball joint.
An undocumented feature is that
the left hand end has a small hole in the side.
In my opinion, it's only function
is to identify the left hand end.
Trial and error would be no fun
with 8 pounds of tie rod.
All of this was done on the driver side
where the tie rod is much easier to get to
and that is also the left hand thread end.
So I ordered a jam nut from Extreme Terrain,
not blaming them but explaining the problem.
Then I filled out a sternly worded
contact form to Rough Country.
and removed the bent tie rod.
It went much easier than I expected.
Anointing the lug nuts and tie rod ends
with PB Blaster every day
for the previous few days may have helped.
Using a digital bathroom scale
that measures to the nearest half pound
I learned two things.
First, the OE tie rod weighs about 4 pounds.
Second, I need to lose weight.
This picture shows how much the fender bender
bent the skinny OE tie rod.
The Rough Country tie rod from Extreme Terrain
weighs about 8 pounds.
It has proper flats to use a real wrench
instead of a pipe wrench
and jam nuts instead of dinky clinch bolts.
A solid bit of kit, it is. But wait, there's more.
The instructions said a silver right hand jam nut
and a black left hand jam nut were included.
The two nuts in the plastic bag were both silver,
so I approached the next step with caution.
(Don't get ahead of me here.)
Careful trial and error and inspection
determined that neither nut was left hand.
Fortunately, I determined that fact before
fuzzing up the threads on the ball joint.
While I was at it, I decided to identify
the left hand end of the 8 pound tie rod
and check the threads on the ball joint.
An undocumented feature is that
the left hand end has a small hole in the side.
In my opinion, it's only function
is to identify the left hand end.
Trial and error would be no fun
with 8 pounds of tie rod.
All of this was done on the driver side
where the tie rod is much easier to get to
and that is also the left hand thread end.
So I ordered a jam nut from Extreme Terrain,
not blaming them but explaining the problem.
Then I filled out a sternly worded
contact form to Rough Country.