so our old brick, the ~400K mile 240GL sedan my wife bought new in december 1987 (its 24 now!) has a badly worn left inner tie rod, there's about 1/2" of in/out play at the inner ball joint.

car has the TRW/CAM racks (the bootie has small end clamped to tie rod) so I ordered the parts from FCP... begin to commence to take the old ones off and whoa, they don't have any flats?



here's the new part I got...



do I use a pipe wrench on the old one??

 

and my own answer is yeah, pipewrench easily took off the old ones.... except, OOPS, I got the wrong replacements, looks like i need the ZF inner tierods that have bolts sticking out, instead of inside threads. so the car sits disabled on jackstands til I can get replacements rushed out :-/