I got a 2006 Toyota Prius, kind of as a hobby car. Something to tinker on and keep my hands busy. It is not my daily driver. Can't even drive it right now. Haven't been able to for months. I replaced the HV battery, rear struts, sway bar bushings, sway bar end links, and front struts. Life was going great. I wanted to replace the control arms and ball joints too. That's where the troubles began. The control arms weren't terrible, but the ball joint has proved to be impossible for me. I cannot get the castle nut off. I've added pb blaster and tried hitting it at an angle with a chisel and I must be doing it wrong because I still can't get it to budge. I'm too scared to try heat but that seems like the only option. But let's put a pin on this part for now. While trying to get better angles to work on the above, I was foolishly turning the steering wheel left to right as needed. One of those times, I turned the wheel all the way to the left, and instead of hitting the "stop" it made a noise and continued to turn (I was not using a lot of force to turn and I'm a rather small person) I freaked out and stopped turning the steering wheel and ran to look at the wheels. Sure enough, they were both at different angles, no longer parallel. I disconnected the tie rod ends and moved the steering back to center. I've since attached the tie rod ends back and it appears to turn left to right at the same angles now but I haven't tried turning to the point where it's supposed to hit the "stop." It's been so long, that I cannot tell if the steering wheel is stiffer or less stiff than it was before I started. I don't want any judgment or insults, I know I messed up. I just need to know what I broke and what needs to be replaced to make sure the steering functions like it needs to. tl;dr: failed trying to remove ball joint and managed to damage some steering components in the process.
Yes you definitely have an nice person generally when I'm taking the ball joints off we're talking the lower ball joints connected to the lower control arm with the nut and the two short bolts usually I withdraw the ball joint with the hub assembly because I'm usually changing the hub assembly wheel bearing at that time I may or may not do the struts but to do the hub wheel bearings I usually pull that whole hub assembly off and then you can get your 19 mm socket in there very easily on the end of your half inch drive gun to blast the castle head nut off after removing the cotter pin. Dang
You may already know this, but just to be sure: At large steering angles the front wheels should not be parallel. This is known as Ackermann steering geometry (Wikipedia link).
