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Stamped Steel, Aluminum, and Forged Steel Control Arms

For the 2014-2016 Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra 1500 trucks, GM offered three dissimilar upper control arms: stamped steel, aluminum, and forged steel. Additionally, in 2014-2016 GM truck had two dissimilar knuckles—aluminum and steel—each with unlike brawl joint pigsty sizes.

Stamped steel and aluminum arms have a larger ball joint that fit the same knuckle. Steel duke with forged steel control arms had smaller brawl joint holes that match the cast steel arms only. This is the same setup found on 2007-2014 models. Forged steel and forged aluminum arms accept retention clips on the brawl articulation so if the ball joint loving cup becomes distorted, it does not fail.

New Stamped Steel Arm Pattern

The NEW stamped steel arms accept a ball joint that is sandwiched between the upper and lower pieces of the arm with a relatively small-scale surface area for brawl articulation retentivity with no supporting clips. If these cups distort, the ball joint fails and falls out.

GM 1500 trucks built after April 1, 2016 are stamped steel arms mated to smaller steel knuckles with the larger of the two ball joints. Basically, they are using the larger brawl articulation from the aluminum arm and putting it in a stamped arm and mating it to a smaller steel knuckle.

For the 2014-2017 GM 1500 trucks, ReadyLIFT offers 2 versions of our 4" SST lift kit. This is determined by which upper control arm that your truck currently has.

69-3414 – Aluminum and Stamped Steel UCA trucks.

69-3416 – Blackness forged steel UCA trucks.

To safely level your GM 1500 with stamped steel command arms, you tin use our 66-3085 leveling kit. Withal, we recommend that you augment the installation with a gear up of aftermarket upper command artillery to foreclose factory ball joint failure.

Bottom Line

If your truck has stamped steel upper control arms and you want to level or 6″ lift your truck—yous will need to install either an aftermarket upper control arm OR buy the factory aluminum upper command arms to replace your stamped control arms. There is no failure consequence with the factory aluminum control arms, the ball joints are the same.

Alternative

If your truck has stamped steel command artillery, you can install our ReadyLIFT iv″ SST Lift Kits which replaces the upper control artillery and all problems are solved.

Stamped Steel Control Arm Forged Steel Control Arm Forged Aluminum Control Arm

(stamped steel control arm) Stamped Steel Upper Control Arm – AVV code

(forged aluminum control arm) Forged Aluminum Upper Control Arm

(forged steel control arm) Forged Steel Upper Control Arm – 2007-up version