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In this video, we show you how to remove and reinstall the front lower control arm for a 2005 Honda Elantra. We show you the passenger's side, but driver's side is the same. It should be the same for any 2001 to 2006 Elantra, and this is one of those repairs you can save money and time doing it yourself, but you will need to take your car and have it aligned after you do the repair. Tools you'll need: jack and jack stands, 14mm, 19mm, and 22mm sockets, a ratchet with extensions, a breaker bar or a pipe for some extra leverage, and two 14mm and 19mm wrenches. You could use a 9/16 standard wrench in place of the 14mm if you had to. You also need a torque wrench and a large hammer.
Start by removing one of the front wheels. If you don't have the benefit of air tools, you'll want to start with the vehicle on the ground. Loosen the lug nuts, then jack-up and secure the vehicle on jack stands. Remove the lug nuts, the wheel cover, and wheel entirely. I'm going to turn the wheel to get a little bit better access for my wrenches. You use 14mm wrenches to hold the backside of the sway bar link, and for the nut, I'm going to put a wrench in here to help me get a little bit extra leverage to break the nut free. We'll fast-forward as we remove that nut the rest of the way.
I'm going to use my 14mm wrench to counter hold. Get that on top. Use the 14mm wrench to break it free. Okay, then as you can see there, what we do is we put the wrench on and then just hook another wrench onto the end just to give yourself some extra leverage. It helps you break the nut free. Two nuts free, pull your sway bar link out, and I've got a 19mm wrench on the nut for the lower ball joint, and another wrench for leverage. You might have to hold the brake rotor in place.
Once you get it broken free, you don't want to lock up your wrench between your axle and the nut, so then you can use your open ended, switching it back and forth. Okay, we'll just speed up here as we loosen that nut up. You don't want to take it quite all the way off yet. Give it a couple of whacks to the spindle here and free up the ball joint. I think you got it. Locate your two 19mm front control arm bolts. I'm going to use my ratchet with a couple of extensions to reach the bolt. To break them free I'm going to use a pipe for extra leverage over my wrench. Speed it up here again as we just remove those two bolts, you can see you use a pipe for some extra leverage to break it free, and then it comes out fairly easily just with your ratchet. We only need to get this bolt out but this bracket is not allowing us to get a sock on it, so we're going to loosen up the other three bolts for the bracket.
The sub-frame bolt is a 19mm. I'm just going to loosen it up a little bit. In this case, I'm going to use the pipe for extra leverage. The other two here are 14mm. With my 22mm socket, I'm going to take down the lower control arm bolt and I'm going to remove it completely. Finish removing this nut from the ball joint, and then, using a pry bar, pry out the rear. Now, take the control out.
Reinstalling the control arm, I make sure I put the little piece here on the backside of the front control arm bushing. I'm going to try and feed the rear bushing in first. I'm going to speed up here. What we do is get that rear control arm bushing up in there. Feed the bolt up in. You won't be able to put the bolt in all the way, but just feed it up in there so that you know that the rear mount is lined up. I'm going to sit the little joint into the spindle, just need to thread the nut and start to reinstall the control arm bolts. Use your socket, ratchet, and extensions. Put them on the bolts and basically just lift the bolts up into place. Push them in and get them going. Then you just want to tighten them up preliminarily.
For that other bolt use a screwdriver and line it up preliminarily. Then use a hammer to drive it in place a little bit, and then tighten it up. Now, you want to torque your two front bolts between 100 and 110 foot-pounds, and the other bolt to about 130 foot-pounds. Tightening up the ball joint nut, I'm going to fast-forward since this is just kind of tedious. You can only do it about an 1/8 to a 1/4 of a turn at a time. Tighten it up with the one wrench and then hook another wrench onto it, pull it nice and tight about as tight as you can with those two wrenches.
Now, I'm installing the link back into the sway bar and to the control arm. Okay, and we get a nice shot of our elbow there. What you can see, once you've got it out, it's pretty easy process to get it back in. You might have to just manipulate the link a little bit to get it to go through the stabilizer bar and the control arm, but then put the nuts on pretty much hand tight. Then use your two 14mm wrenches, and we actually also used two 14mm wrenches, and you could also use a 14 and a 9/16 if you had to.
You basically want to get them about as tight as you can with a wrench, and then just hook the wrench on and give it another pull about a 1/4 of a turn using both wrenches. Put the wheel back in place. Put the hubcap on, start your lug nuts, and you just want to hand tighten them first to make sure you don't cross the threads. Then once they're hand started just preliminarily tighten them up. With the car back on the ground with a little bit of weight on it, I'm going to use the 22mm and a torque wrench that I've set to 100 foot-pounds to torque them.
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