Best place to buy new tie rod ends?

[enthuzed]

I certainly need to replace at least one of these. Who knows the best place to buy good replacements before I end up doing a huge ringaround & probably getting the huge runaround...? Who has bought some recently?

[Vulpes]

I have recently done my tie rods and ball joints. I just got mine from my local parts supplier like REPCO. Anybody has them as they are not a Mitsubishi part and readily available.

[redzone]

i can get em no sweat, they're not expensive

[PORT_NXR]

Hey, I saw these on Ebay for really cheap. Check em out if they might work.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Galant-Scorp-Sig ... 2a0cec0a86

[enthuzed]

Thanks Port for keeping your eyes open. By the time you add postage you can get them locally & see exactly what you're buying.
And in my case, that still wasn't enough. I picked up two Roadsafe TE463L balljoints (outer) from my local Burson store. I inspected a balljoint and compared it to an old one, it looked spot on. Had the castellated nut & cotter pin. Sweet I thought. Removed one side off the car and replaced it. Thought the grease nipple on the bottom was a bit different. Okay, could deal with that. Removed the other side then opened the other box.

The unit was a different colour but worse than that, the thread wasn't as long, like 15mm shorter & had a nylon nut & no cotter pin. I cursed, put it on & adjusted it to where seemed about right. It looked like there was little to no spare thread to wind it in any further if required but as I was halfway through the process put it on the car anyway. The nylon nut looked pretty useless so I drilled a hole through the guts of the threaded section & whacked in a cotter pin.

[enthuzed]

The next day I booked a wheel alignment for the following day then ventured back to Burson & told them what I encountered. I asked the guy to bring out half a dozen boxes at random. He checked out the back to find that he had no more. Checked the computer, had another look. Nothing. Told him where I was headed & he called a store near there to confirm that they had some with the castellated nut & cotter pin. I planned to matchbthe one with the grease nipple.
I hotfooted to that store to find they had a slightly different type again! It indeed had the castellated nut, but no nipple and the boot was a different design where it didn't use a metal retainer - it was more like the one with the bloody nylon nut!
I ended up getting under the car with a tape measure, purchasing this new one & fitting it. Sure it gave me about 10-12mm of adjustment, but even then the hole was drilled too far down for the cotter pin to go through it properly. Unbelievable! These are supposed to be an ISO9001 Taiwanese product. Quality accredited, pig's arse!!
Moral of the story: take in an old one and compare it to both super mega-carefully!!