Suggestions On Quality Front Suspension Components

I work for a drivetrain company that is a part of a small chain of parts stores. Moog parts are lifetime warranty items. I compared lower ball joints for my 84 D150 , Moog vs our line of lower priced units. The Moog items seem to be better built.
The only ones I know of that might be better are afco units that are a low friction racing unit, at about double plus some of Moog pricing.
I am going to use Moog parts when I build the front end for my 83 project truck.
I replaced my upper and lowers on my 84 D150 8 years ago.
no issues so far.

I've replaced at least four sets of Moog upper/lower ball joints that were done at other shops for OEM Mopar because you had to keep correcting the steering as you were driving. These were all 4x4 trucks although I do know of another tech in our shop that installed customer supplied ball joints for an 06 2wd 3500 truck that had the same issue when he was done. Customer chose to live with it since he bought the parts.

August 2012 I redid the entire front end on our 2002 1500 (2wd quad cab). The oem ball joints all four had split boots. Outer tie rod ends were loose (had 120~k on them).

When researching parts I found a striking similarity of the raybestos pro line to the oem parts on the truck. Dust boots in particular looked identical and raybestos also used a lock nut with a hex holding head formed on the ball stud. On the lowers they also were the oem style of pressing in the BJ and then folding over/staking a retaining ring.

In that case I did go with moog on the ball joints because I felt that moog had a better dust boot vs the more rigid plastic of the oem/raybestos and on the lower balljoint they knurled the OD where it pressed into the arm and gave you a snap ring to retain it. Which I strongly preferred over staking in something so critical to function and safety. At the factory I have no doubt they used a several ton automatic press to drive it in and stake it over in one quick, controlled operation. On the upper arms I went with moog again only for the reasoning of the better dust boot. In all other respects I think raybestos was a better part. OEM uca was an aluminum forging, moog was a much heavier steel based part (not even painted at that)


Those are the only two situations where I used moog and really because I felt between the drawbacks of both part designs the moog was the lesser of the two evils. It is unlikely we're going to be driving that truck another 100k so I wasn't terribly concerned. I just grease everything on a regular basis.

My Shadow lasted 200k on the oem chrysler parts. The moog replacement ball joints and outer tie rod ends were junk in less than 40k of relatively light use. In december 2010 I replaced the same parts with raybestos pro line and I have had the front end apart a couple times since then for varying reasons (clutch, transmission swap, axle replacements act) and those same parts are still very tight and hard to move by hand.

The front end of the B-van is all raybestos pro line or OEM replacement. I did that on the cheap by shopping ebay for discontinued/closeout/old stock liquidation and found some of the mopar stuff had the same number code stamps as the raybestos pro line stuff in a few cases.

I havn't worked on anything newer than 02/03 to date so I have no comment but for 02/03 and maybe older I have a good feeling that Dana (now raybestos via Affinia corp) was the supplier and not federal mogul/moog if that says anything to what chrysler thinks of moog.