Generally sharing the opinions of the other two posters, I would have at one time said the same thing. Recently however, I purchased an tie rod assembly from an unnamed source and discovered, much to my disgust, that the replacement tie rod was a rinky-dink looking modern interpretation of what the engineers at Mercedes orginally designed and produced. I then got the two separate ends, it takes a right and a left for each side, one long one and one short one, and then exchanged 'em on the OE tie rod. Used a big C clamp to 'caliper' the tie rod on the car and adjusted the new ends to match the clamp. Good enough to get it in for an alignment. The OE style ends just look alot beefier (better when it comes to steering links) to me. Unfortunately, the newer style OE type t/r ends use Nyloc nuts instead of encastleated nuts and cotter pins like the orignal. I don't really like that either, but time marches on .... we can either choose to: march along, or get trampled.

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78 300d 158k driver
80 300d 200k fixer
80 300d parts car
98 Cherokee 240k

" I know for certain that someday while parking or un-parking my Jeep Cherokee, I'm gonna' either pull the headlight switch right outa' its dashboard OR stomp its hood release lever clean offa' the kick panel. It's just a matter of which will happen first."