I’m leaning towards $150 powder coat & new bushings

Well reasoned, and a lot more info there than I care to argue with....much. Uniballs are indeed a single sheer, as are ball joints. And indeed the weak point is the centre bolt for sure. The Total Chaos arms use a grade 8 9/16" bolt, having a tensile strength somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000lbs (I run emf rod ends uniballs which are advertised as being even stronger). Probably not much different than what jba uses I'm sure, but either is vastly superior to the stock ball joint pin.

I am all for powder coating high-use metals but couldn’t you just hit it with some brake caliper paint?

If it’s good enough for the heat fluctuation of brake calipers, a pair of non-touched UCA’s should withstand whatever is thrown at them.

Looks good! Ya I was wondering if JBA had any other colors


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Don't waste your money on powder coat. It's going to look like shit in 18 months from all the dirt and debris coming off the tires. We live in northern Alberta, we have snow on the ground for nearly 8 months of the year, and before this year they used calcium chloride spray on the roads. The stuff eats everything. Literally the only rust on my truck is on items that have been powder coated.

Por15 is vastly more durable and comes in a whole host of colours for a fraction of the cost

Thanks but por15 is directly applied to a clean prepped metal surface. Don’t I need to strip the original powder coat off first for this to work well ?

If that’s the case, might was well pay a shop to sandblast, prep and powder coat. Besides, I’m not good at painting :-)

Also my UCA are powdered coated red from jba. They are about a year old and they still look new. One of benefits of the Bay Area.

No, you can paint directly over rust and paint. Since you're starting with new parts, I'd scuff them up a bit prior to using their etching primer. After that though you're good to go.
Granted you don't get the snow in SF, but the ocean air isn't nice to metal either.

Thank you again to everyone’s response, so I decided on the UCAs. My next dilemma is the rear coils, I’m guessing 2” coils? I see a lot about dobinsons, what part number would I get? I’m pretty much at stock weight in the rear with no added weight other then some load for camping, but eventually I want to add the rear tire carrier but in the future haha


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I agree with what jetboy said. I could not justify running uniballs for my application. Here in the PNW/ Westcoast of Canada, we deal with a lot of rain = lots of mud and muck that will get into the uniball; therefore shortening the lifespan of that part. You can only spray so much drylube/PTFE spray until the inevitable happens and replacement is needed. When that happens, then you pull the part to service and replace, go for alignment, etc..you get the picture. I chose JBA because they were affordable, customer service was superb, 3 zerk fittings for maintenance, balljoint is easily found and easily replaced incase of failure. This works for me.

However, if I could do it all over again, I would do dobinsons UCA or Ironman UCA. Reason being is less maintenance with the closed balljoint/rubber bushing design. I have to grease the JBAs every 2-3 offroading trips to push out the old grease that has all the dirt and muck. Gets pretty tiresome imho.