Quote:
Originally Posted by Lamby
... The earlier versions of the x5 <03 have the male bolt type heads and the later 03> x5's have the newer star female bolts. I have only used the star female bolts and not had one shear off on me yet...
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That makes sense. On my '01, the original screws were Torx E12, and the Lemfoerder ball joints I replaced the originals with came with Torx T45. Same screws, different heads, of course. I guess Lemfoerder figured out the weakness of the E12 heads in this application.
BTW, I follow the horror stories on this list about replacing these ball joints, but I had no problems at all swapping mine out at ~170k miles. Perhaps that is due to the California climate.