Yesterday I attempted to replace the passenger-side lower control arm/ball joint on my 2000 Protege ES. After 5 hours of hammering on rusted bolts with an impact, jumping on a breaker bar, soliciting the help of a few friends and nearly giving up a few times the job was done.

One problem. One of my friends thought it was necessary to remove the bracket (Figure 3 in the attached photo) in order to bring the back of the control arm down and get the ball joint free. I disagreed but entertained the idea and attempted to remove the bolts securing the bracket with an impact. I'm not sure what happened but the bolt highlighted in red broke. Not the bolt head, but I'm guessing half way up. The bolt is a third of the way out but it just spins and I'm not able to pull it out completely.

We finished the job without removing the bracket as I initially thought but I'm wondering how concerned I should be that the bolt (highlighted in red) may no longer be securing that portion of the bracket. The rear bushing itself has a bolt going through it where the bracket sits so I don't see it being a huge problem for the time being. The car drives fine for now. Any thoughts?

 

This bracket secures the rear upright bushing. I would not feel comfortable driving this car without the outer bolt in place. The bracket will bend with every motion of the control arm and finally it will brake.
Have you ever opened a can and then wiggled the lid until it came off? Same thing, different can.

 

Thanks for the response. Do you know where this bolt ultimately terminates? How would I access in order to repair.. Should I attempt to remove the other bracket bolts?

 

It appears to bolt right into the sub-frame or chassis? I hope you used lots of some kind of a rust release agent before attempting to remove these bolts?
There also appears to be three other bolts, including the one that goes through the bushing, that hold the whole mess in place, and that this is last bolt out, or outer bolt in the sequence? It's also the only one on that side of the bushing so I would have to agree with TP, that it would likely be dangerous to drive the car very far like that. I'm surprised it only called for 13 lb.ft. of torque on it though? I've tightened spark plugs more than that.
Time to get out the drill and get rid of the broken piece. Oh joy. Every mechanics nightmare.

 

Yikes, now I'm a bit nervous.

What is the best way to get at the nut that's welded to the subframe.. through the floor board or by cutting a hole in the wheel well?

May end up taking it to a shop but that would defeat the purpose of doing this job myself.

 

I don't know and I don't think you want to be messin' with a perfectly good captured nut. Why not simply drill out the rest of the bolt and replace it? Center it as best you can, start off with a small bit and work up until you are almost to the threaded portion. By then they are usually pretty easy to remove. I'm mean, it only had 13 lb-ft of torque applied to it originally, so it can't be a hardened bolt. Probably just a std grade 5.