One of the first things you want to do is safely raise and support your vehicle by the frame, so your suspension can hang. Once you've done that, take a small pry bar, and we're going to take off this center cap. If you were to spin it, you're going to see a little notch in the cap. Just carefully slide this off of here. That exposes our 22-millimeter lug nuts. Remove all six. Remove your wheel. Now, to remove our 21-millimeter nut. Let's just put that nut on just a couple threads. Now, we're going to take a hammer, and we're going to hit right here on the knuckle. You want to be very careful for your brake rotor.
Now, that the wheel is off, we have a clear view of where we're going to start working. We're going to disconnect the electrical. This is the ABS right here, and it's very delicate. I'm just going to come right up along here, and you're going to see where it's...well, where it's supposed to be mounted to the frame. Should be pretty secure. This is missing about half of its clip, so I'll make sure I secure it in afterward. This purple right here is a little lock. It's holding it from becoming separated. I like to just come right in between here. Pop that up. Now, we'll separate this. Just take a peek. Make sure you don't see any funny colors. If you were to come right down along here, we're going to get this clip off of here as well. Just give it a little twist. Lift it up. Grab that ABS wire. Carefully set it aside.
The next thing we're going to do is remove this 10-millimeter headed bolt. So, just make sure everything is nice and clear from your upper control arm. We're going to go ahead and take out this nut right here. Let's just go ahead and take that upper ball joint nut, and just start it on there just a couple threads. The next thing we're going to do is come right up here with our pickle fork, which is this tool right here, right up along the top. And then I'm going to use my hammer, and I'm going to separate the ball joint from the knuckle. Just be careful because it will want to pull away, and it could put a tug on your axle. I'm just going to carefully rest this away. If you wanted to, you can secure it with something such as a bungee cord. Okay. Just make sure we have the ABS wire, so it's not getting a tug. It's not putting a tug on the axle in any way. The next thing we're going to do is remove the bolts that go from right here through to the other side. I like to use a 21-millimeter on the inside area, and then you'd use a 21-millimeter on the outer portion as well to remove the nut. Leave that one in like that for now. Do the same to the other side. Let's go ahead and take the bolts out.
Outer. Go ahead grab onto that control arm. There it is, friends. Now, it's a good idea to just make sure that this area of your cam bolts are nice and clean, and then we're just going to hit it with some copper Never-Seez here, and that's going to help the alignment professional down the line.
Now, it's going to be time to install your brand new control arm. One of the first things that you want to do with that control arm is make sure that you have the same shape. As you'll notice, this isn't a perfect V. If you were to see that the slanted end on this side was slanted on the other side for some reason, that means you have the wrong side of the vehicle. Once you know you have the right side, go ahead and put it up in here. Might require a couple light bonks just to kind of get it in there. I like to use a rubber mallet for that. Just get it so it's at least lined up enough to be able to line up the bolt and get it started. Let's go ahead and see if we can get this bolt started in here. Feels like it's starting to want to go in. Just have to try to get the right angle with the control arm. Okay. Before you go ahead and push it in all the way, you need to make sure that you have your adjuster so it's facing up and inside of the groove. We have a little piton that comes out. And usually, when I put these in, I'll get them both started, and then I'll kind of put these back to exactly where I got them from. And then the alignment professional can, of course, align it from there.
Let's go ahead and get this back on there. As you can tell, the originals came with this little plastic in there. You can go ahead and pop that out of there if you want to. I'm going to leave it in though because that's going to tell me exactly where this needs to be when it comes to lining it up. Just turn the bolt side until it lines up where it needs to be. Go ahead and start it on there. We'll do the same to the other side.
Now, before we go ahead and tighten these up, it's important to remember that you don't want your control arm sitting down like this when you tighten it up. Essentially, the way that you want the control arm to be, when it's tight, is as if the vehicle was sitting on the ground right now. With all the weight of the vehicle on this wheel, it would of course be having this sitting almost parallel to the ground, so that's where we're going to go. I'm just going to slide this in there, and now I'll realign everything here, and then we'll snug it up. Okay, that bottomed out. We'll torque it to manufacturer's specifications in one minute. Now, that both of those are snug, we can take this out, and we'll torque these to 140 foot-pounds. So, now we'll just get this, so we can get the upper ball joint stud in here. You're going to want a pry bar, so you can pry down on this. So, I'll grab that real quick. Let's go ahead and pry this down, so we can start the nut in there.
Let's go ahead and bottom this out. Now, the torque for this should be 37 foot-pounds. Obviously, as you can tell by the limited amount of space in between the axle and the nut, we're not going to be able to get a torque wrench in there. Thirty-seven foot-pounds isn't very much just to say. Take a nice long wrench. Put it on there. Give it a couple nice tugs. Once you're sure that it's tight, now you're going to want to take a peek at that stud for the ball joint, and the nut itself, to see if you have a slot lined up with the hole. If you don't, you need to continue tightening, not loosening, until you get to the next hole.
Go ahead and peen over that cotter pin, so it locks in the nut. There's no way that it can loosen up on its own. Let's go ahead and get this little grease fitting in there. Let's go ahead and pump some grease into this. I'm just going to put a little splash of Never-Seez in here. I've got my mounting bolt. Let's use our 10-millimeter and snug it up. Make sure it's fully secured. Make sure there's nothing binding your flex hose for your breaks are not twisted in any way.
Now, it's time to get our ABS wire resecured. Let's go ahead and put it in right here. Make sure it cannot come loose. If this can hang around and move around, it could potentially get damaged. Go ahead and connect this in now. Listen for a click. Give it a tug. Go ahead and slide in your lock. Now, we're going to take our mounting hardware here and just slide it right down in it. It's just a little push clip. Give it a nice tug. Make sure it's definitely secured.
So, of course, next, you'd want to go ahead and torque down this nut right here, and that's going to be torqued to 177 foot-pounds. You can do that several ways. If you were to just do it like this, what you're going to notice is it just keeps spinning. If that was the case, what you would do is you can use a pry bar coming straight through these lug studs like this down to the ground. And so, it holds it from spinning on you, and then you would torque it. If you didn't want to go through the process doing that, you can go ahead and throw the wheel up on there, and then go through the center hole, which is the way that I'm going to do it.
We'll grab those lug nuts. Start them all on there. Let's bottom these out. Now, we'll bring it down to the ground, and we'll make it so the wheel is just barely touching enough, so the wheel can't spin. It's time to torque down this axle nut 177 foot-pounds like I said. Torqued. Now, let's do the lug nuts 140 foot-pounds. Go crisscross. Torqued.
Now, it's going to be time to get the center cover on. Before you go ahead and pound it on there, just take a look at the back. You're going to see something that looks a lot like a valve stem. Line it up. It's going to go pretty much just like this. Light bonk and then, of course, clean up your wheel, make it look nice and pretty, and take it for a road test.