Unserviceable assembly? Don't be afraid to try and fix it yourself.

No Time said:

In reply to WonkoTheSane and Pete:

You just helped with a question I was mulling over.

I was looking ahead and deciding if I should replace the bushings or the whole control arm in 98 Ram. You've helped my cheap ass accept the extra cost of the control arm assembly is worth the time saving over replacing only the bushings.

Glad to be helpful for something :)

They do.  That's why there's a whole industry supplying aftermarket parts. Some of it they reverse engineer themselves, but plenty of it they buy the specifications from the manufacturer and make the parts themselves.

To wit: Honda only sells front lower control arm assemblies for my Odyssey.  But I can get OEM aftermarket replacement bushings.

Edit: Ah! I hate it when I reply to the last post that was on the link on the front page!

I have always considered the phrase: "No user serviceable parts inside" to be more of a challenge than a warning.

If it is broken and you can't fix it - Then at least TRY to fix it. You have nothing to lose and, at worst, you might learn something. At best, you might fix it. 

1994, I was working at a Toyota dealership. We received a SST for rebuilding the manual trans on the new Supra Turbo. 3 months later we received a TSB stating that all the transmissions were to be returned to ZF for warranty or out of warranty repairs and we were to order a complete unit. At school we were told that very few technicians had the capability to overhaul the unit and they anticipated few if any repairs necessary. Right around that time they began having us install reman automatics in just about everything as well. The only time we could do an automatic trans overhaul was if it wasn't under warranty or it was one of the few not offered. To this day I still rebuild them all including other makes and models provided parts are available. The dealer techs you have now have zero clue how they even work. 

In reply to hevster1 :

We've seen what they do to Subaru engines.

A friend is a lead tech at a large Toyota dealer, and he says most people don't care to know how things work or do anything that isn't stone simple.  Knock out maintenance, read codes and hang parts, that's all.  Most won't even touch the non Toyota, badge engineered cars.  Rebuilding a transmission or other major component requires a level of care and craftsmanship that they can't really have any QC set up for, and doesn't fit in with that "move work through the building" mind set.

That's why I don't work at a dealership, money be damned.

I'm sometimes thwarted by the need for a special tool to complete the repair. I will say that I once reconstructed the brush hoods of a discontinued ABS pump motor from brass sheet after the plastic (!) original melted, following a module failure. I sent the module out for repair after pricing the pro-quality soldering station I'd need to buy for that fix. Oh, and I fixed reverse gear in a Nissan 5-speed using an old stainless-steel wiper-blade strip... 

I bought an R53 Mini for $750 in 2019. 'needs a clutch' yeah, and an everything else. It also had a broken selector fork. Well, it was junk and unrepairable, so I had little to lose. I think a new gearbox was around $5k. Cheap compared to Porsche. I found a used selector fork from a Ford focus on eBay that dropped right in. It was fun dismantling it with no manual. There was an enormous quantity of aluminium sparkles in the oil from ground up fork, so I was a little apprehensive about the bearings. But after about 30k on the repaired gearbox, it is still running beautifully.