Be very very carefull about poor quality ball joints that are made in China and are stocked my many Mini specialists. We here in Australia have found that ball joint failure can be nearly fatal. For this reason, I always use NOS or QH.

I'd never thought of that... when 1 in 4 of a full set needed trimming, the apparent issue was the dome nut or that end of the hub. Easier to do the nut! Also, when one lives 'way out in the "colonies", has only one Mini and very few spares (new or used), the only lock tabs available would be the ones just removed: prudence usually suggests using the new part. (No lathe either!)

I had that on my 60 with stock lock tabs chucked the nut in the lathe and took about .020 off and put in a couple shims for future adjustment.

That makes sense.

If that happens, I use a different lock tab as the one supplied is probably massively too thick*.


*A bit like isn't-a-Specialist.

Thanks for confirming I'm not alone in this.

The only way to know if they are good or bad quality is to use them. If they show signs of problems, we'll replace them. No need to get all panic-y on quality from the get-go. He has that second set on hand, so if things start to behave or appear increasingly abnormal, there's a step 2 to head to implement before spending more $. So far it's just the shim deal that's different. It used to be that they never cam with enough shims and I'd have to disassemble a bunch of other balljoints to gather up enough to stack up. Seems the manufacturing has overcompensated the other direction. This indicates that balljoint manufacturing must be a government run operation (bad joke).

It's not for a LeMons car. It's a fellow club member's car I'm just helping out on.


I had metro hubs and the corresponding early balljoints on the LeMons mini when we first built it and for a few years. A highly-skiled friend helped me by using a morse taper (I think??) to ream the top and bottom arms so that the arms sucked in closer to the hub more along the lines of stock mini suspension arm spacing. I stopped using them when we had an impact that broke the top balljoint pin and I didn't have a spare and had to swap out the suspension arms again.

There were some crappy ones floating around for a while in fact someone on the board had one fail. I would make sure you have decent ones some parts are worth paying the extra bucks for.
If it is for a Lemons car why don't you use the Metro hubs with the screw in ball joints along with adjustable suspension of course, i remember seeing Mini ones being produced somewhere.
FWIW if you lapped them in the slop would have obviously been worse.

I have had to sand a bit off of dome nuts before but not the 0.010" it sounds like you observed.

I had the same issue with one ball joint years ago. Like you I had to sand down the dome nut to get the right compression.

I've had it before where the dome nut of the balljoint bottoms out on the top of the threaded portion of the hub and I've had to take a file to the hub, but this is the first time I've had to actually sand down the flat of the dome nut so that it would tighten down enough.

I'm not immune to failure so I'm posting here to find out if I'm doing something wrong. We tried 2 different brand balljoint kits and both offer the same result, although one is slightly better than the other and we mixed/matched to test things for good measure.

The symptom is that when the dome nut is tightened all the way down, with the inner cup in place (no spring on the bottom), the locktab-cupped washer in place, and the grease nipple in place, the dome nut will tighten down all the way against the locktab washer and the swivel pin still has a good .010" play in it. Obviously, adding shims just worsens the play.

We ended up sanding/filing the flat face of the dome nut and it now tightens up, but I don't like that there is not at least one thin shim to remove when the balljoints settle in and loosen up after a year or so. (FWIW, I know about lapping in balljoints, have done it, and am a fervent believer that it is not the best use of my time).

Also, this is the first time I've ever opened a couple of packages of balljoints and there is absolutely no evidence of heat treating of the dome nut. I understand things change and parts quality and yadda yadda, but while I've noticed over the years a lessening of area that shows the heat treatment bluing, this is the first time I've not seen ANY and on two different brands of balljoint kits.