Is it for the mondeo?

In which case they are really titchy in the first place.

The rears don't have to worry about steering angles and just move their joints up and down so you don't need as wide a range of movement in the ball joint. The fronts need to swivel about with the steering as well as the suspension so theirjoints need to be designed to move about more, hen e the greater articulation required in the front ball joints to compensate for this.

I've tried shorter and longer drop links at the front and they fail to work but in the rear they don't move as much so if you were to make them drasticly shorter it won't be such an issue