I was disassembling the front end on a 70 442 yesterday. There wasn't a ton of grease or dirt but as I was scraping stuff I noticed the cotter pins in the upper/lower ball joints, tie rod ends and center link all to be copper. That is a first for me. I'm kinda glad they were copper because I couldn't remove them because they were too soft so I was able to put my impact socket on them all and just spin the nut off after removing what I could.



Im thinking that would not have been easy if they weren't copper. This front end seems to never have been apart and still sports the original ball joints with rivets.

 

Original parts - cool.

 

You can see they are original ball joints. The copper pins are repro-ed now, the Buick guys are really crazy about them.