Back to my house by 10PM. Repair completed 10:10-10:40. Greg confirms he got home to his house (maybe 25 miles south) and it drove OK. He's on a family mission today - probably no time for him to post. I've got lots of pics and videos anyway.
First off - the failure was in the cast (or forged) part of the ball joint mount. Not sure if his former habit of driving on ocean beached contributed to the problem, or if previous strut experiments caused ball joint jamming and accompanying cracks to the mount. Anyway, they were OEM and very old (2002) UCAs. He has closeups of the grain structure for the metallurgists.
Two huge bullets we dodged by it finally letting loose on pavement:
Any distance off pavement and we would have had to leave it there and drive 2 hours to my house to get the spares or a welder. AAA only works if you're on pavement. (Yeah AAA Premier! 200 miles free!) Turns out that might have been faster anyway. And if I had only decided to bring along the UCAs I had in spares, it would have been a half-hour inconvenience on the trail. Ahhh, hindsight.
BUT, we were on a lot of dead end trails, and if anybody fails on a narrow section with no bypass, the far truck isn't going to get by go get help. Ick. Yet another worry.
Plus the minor safety issue of losing steering control on a knife-edge ridge trail or 45 degree downslope.
First the carnage:
Flatbed took about 4 hours to arrive. We were pretty far from the dispatched station.
Airing up. We had plenty of time waiting for the flatbed, so we just used compressors for free instead of my Powertank that takes only 30 seconds a tire, but costs $1 per.