Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
We've got our wheel off here so you can kind of see what we're doing a little better. Whatever is easier for you doing this on the ground in your driveway if you need to, jack it up, and take the wheel off. But the sway bar links are towards the inside of the car here, so we've got it up in the air. You don't really need to be over in this area, but whatever's easier. That's why we've got the wheel off. It just lets more light in here so you can see what we're doing.
I'm going to take some rust penetrant and spray it in on the sway bar link here, both ends of it. Use a rag just to keep it from dripping all over the floor. A little more in here. These are 14 millimeter. And then on the end of these, to counter hold them, the 5 millimeter Allen key. They're usually pretty rusty, you have to work it in there. Get in there nice. Make sure it's seated all the way. Now, I'm going to attempt to break this free. Once that's broken free, I can use this to counter hold it, and I'll just take it off. There's a lot of rusty bits coming out of here, so I'm just going to keep spraying rust penetrant on here. Actually, I was tightening it to clear the threads. Now I'm going to loosen it again. I'm just going to keep doing that over and over again until I get it to come off. Worst case, if you're doing this and this Allen key part strips, you're going to have to come over here with some vice grips and grip down or hold it as tight as you can, and remove this.
Then of course, if you're trying to reuse the sway bar link, you're probably going to damage it if this gets stripped. You'll have to have it replaced with a new one. But we're taking this off to put a new one on anyways. I switched to a ratcheting wrench just to make this a little easier. I'm going in and out because the threads get gummed up with the rusty junk. If these threads are really rusty, you can take a wire brush and try to knock some of the stuff off. Might make it a little easier for these to turn, and eventually, it should come off. Once you get it past the locking bit of the nut, it'll start to get a lot easier. That's one end. But instead of taking it out, I'm going to leave it in there and just throw the nut on real loosely. Whoop. If I can get over the threads, just throw it on real loosely. Just so that when I'm working on this one, it's not flopping around everywhere. Take a brush and knock off any big pieces of rust.
Additionally, that would be a sign of a loose sway bar link is that sort of rattling. I'm going to use a deep socket and longer ratchet. I'm going to try to just break this free before I start turning on it. All right, so now I can see it's just turning in the little ball joint, but it is broken free from here. Put on some more rust penetrant, and put a ratcheting wrench on here. And the five millimeter Allen to car hold. And this will be the same as the other one, just got to keep working at it. All right. And sometimes you almost get it off just the way it's supposed to go with the Allen key and it strips right here at the end. Not quite there. So now I have to get some locking pliers on here and finished taking it off the rest of the way.
Since I don't need the opening in the wrench, I'm going to switch to a ratchet with a 14 millimeter socket and finish this off. Snap the pliers off of here, get this nut off. There's our sway bar link.
Here's the original sway bar link. Brand new one from 1aauto.com. It's the same style, these line up nicely, comes with new nuts. These are locking nuts. See how they're oblong. And also you can put in the hex key in here. Those should fit great and work great for us.
Take the nuts off of these. They're only going to line up one way. Get the nuts started. Probably be able to spin them down until they get to the oblong part that locks. These are actually 15's. I'm using a ratcheting wrench and just watching to see if they're tightening down without spinning in the ball joint part, which it looks like it is. So, now it's starting to spin. So that's as tight as I can go with that one for now.
Let's start with one now. Same way. I actually have this one seated down and it feels tight. And this one needs to be tightened some more. So what I will do is put a wrench on here, a hex key in here and just snug this down. Get it nice and tight. Do the same for this one. That's already nice and tight. Get this off. That sway bar link is replaced.
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