Loosening Ball Links

The new ball links fit very tight over the balls. I heard that there are two tricks to loosen them: the rough way - pinch firmly in the fitted links or the fine way - "sand" the interior. I went for the fine way. The canopy retaining post (the two rear pins holding the canopy) have both a ball on the end and a hex structure, making it perfectly suited to do this job! I put one in my accu-drilling machine, and put some "jif" (thick fluid stuff to clean your kitchen, it contains chalk) on the ball. Then I put the ball in a ball link and slowly turned the ball for 20 seconds and cleaned it. If it showed still too tight around the real ball I repeated the process. More recently I found that the jif is not needed, the 'rough' metal alone sands already enough.