Pricey shop charge?

[McGarrett]

Kinda at a loss here. My regular local shop has been replacing some things on my aging ride for the past 4 + years. An alternator here. Water pump there. Another starter. Earlier this week I got around to replacing both drive axles due to torn boots, grease all over & clicking. $330.00 for the pair installed - another fairly priced job. On pickup he tells me that the lower control arms need to be replaced and they won't pass the annual inspection. OK. The front end has been noisy ever since the clutch was replaced. I get it. He then says everything is some one piece assembly and that they cost about $300.00 per side. Throw in labor and and he writes down $846.00. <gulp>

Not one to throw good money after bad I need to look into this more. I mean, it's a 13 year old Sentra with nearly 190K miles. Private sale value on this thing is ~maybe~ fifteen hundred bucks. I poked around and found that the parts are downright cheap - they're not some exotic one piece double-wishbone, gold-plated chrome molly titanium alloy super ultra mega rare Earth examples of alien engineering. They're....control arms. With rubber bushings. On the rare scale of 1 to 10 they're a -11. You see where I'm going with this.

I'm going to hit another shop unless someone can tell me this is what to expect. This is the longest I've ever kept a car. Engine & tranny are tight. Everything works just fine. So it's worth it to me to throw a grand at it to keep it on the road. But eight fitty for stamped steel & rubber? Hmmm...

[i68k]

not sure why you'd need control arms, it must be shop policy to buy an exact replacement part so that it bolts in. you almost never need to change the control arm itself, as all the bushings and ball joint are replaceable, but they need to be pressed in. not sure why they didnt do this all at the same time, while they were doing your axles as this wouldve been already disassembled. the only difficult thing about removing the control arm, is getting the damn ball joint bolt off, i had to grind mine off when i replaced the ball joints. you could do these yourself with appropriate tools, if youre knowledgeable enough. so, some of the price you are being quoted sounds like its another whole control arm to replace your old one.

if you visit rockauto.com, you can see each side loaded control arm costs less than $100, so this is what your shop would get, their price may also be high if they are using genuine nissan control arms, those are like $300 each. if you were to just get bushings and ball joints, bushing $13, ball joint $20. this means $33 per side using your old control arm.