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Whichever parts you wind up with, try to avoid Moog. They are a Federal-Mogul brand. FM is in very serious financial distress
and has been for awhile now. They long ago began taking money out of
"product" (as the MBAs refer to everything). Much of their stuff is now
sourced out of China and similar countries.
The problem with avoiding F-M branded products, is you eliminate 75 % of the available parts. F-M bought up so many companies some years back.
I think all manufactures are "taking money out of the product"
And personally, I have yet to find that F-M parts are consistently worse than others. Some divisions of F-M have suffered far worse under the financial stress than others- Wagner, for example, has definitely been flushed down the crapper. But Champion plugs still work far better in my cars than any other brand (sorry, Dan, but I've had the kind of luck with Autoshites that you've had with Champions!). I just bought a set of Moog ball joints that still have all the Moog design features that made them better than TRW (like nested bearing cups with grease slots). It may be that there are "downgraded" Moog parts in the pipeline now and I just got a set of older stock parts, but I haven't seen the evidence yet.
But one thing you gotta remember that it COSTS a company a fair amount money to redesign and cheapen a part that has been in production for decades, like a 60's Mopar balljoint, because it means changing out all the production tooling. Also the payoff, that is to say savings in production cost to recover the initial design change cost, is much slower on older-car parts that have dropped down to lower production rates. So really, those kind of parts aren't really on the front line for "money saving" redesigns. New parts, say ball joints for 2005 cars, for example, would be first in line for cheapening. The thing you gotta watch out for with older-design Moog parts- or those from any company, really- is related more to slacking off on QA, and moving production to places with notoriously crappy QA like China, for example. The parts I bought were out of Mexico, which has a pretty good reputation in auto parts, believe it or not.
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