Replaces
Part Details
Product Features
TRQ drivetrain kits are manufactured using premium raw materials to restore original performance. Each TRQ drivetrain component is designed to be a direct, maintenance-free replacement to the stock unit. To extend the service life of your drivetrain, TRQ recommends replacing wheel hubs, bearings, and constant velocity (CV) drive axles at the same time to ensure even wear of components and improved ride comfort. All products are fit and road-tested in our Massachusetts R&D facility to ensure we deliver on our promise of Trusted Reliable Quality.
Our steering and suspension components are pre-greased and sealed for long life and do not require the extra maintenance typically required by greaseable versions.
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New
Attention California Customers:
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Chromium (Hexavalent Compounds), which is known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov
Lifetime Warranty
This item is backed by our limited lifetime warranty. In the event that this item should fail due to manufacturing defects during intended use, we will replace the part free of charge. This warranty covers the cost of the part only.
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Hey friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Honda Accord. We're going to be doing a right front axle. Going to be a fairly easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need this part or any other part, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.
Okay everybody. So here we go. I've got my 19 millimeter socket, my long handle ratchet. I've got the vehicle supported off the ground, with the wheel just barely touching so that it can't spin while I try to loosen these, counterclockwise. I'm just going to give them one quick crank, just like that, just to break them free so when it's up in the air, they'll come off a lot easier. Okay? I mean if you're using an air gun, you really don't have to worry about doing this, but for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to show you that right now.
Now we'll lift it up and we'll be good to go. Now that we broke them all free. Like I said, if you didn't have an air gun, you'd want to break them free on the ground first and then you can continue ratcheting them off. Get them out of the way. You have access to an air gun, it's going to make your life easier. I'm going to start using an air gun to continue on with the video, but you can always use a ratchet to do whatever you need to do. 19 millimeter socket, I'm going to put this one on just a little bit. I'm going to set these lug nuts out of the way. I'm going to remove this one, so now I can use two hands. I'm going to hold my wheel, remove that lug nut that I started on a couple of threads, can set this aside. So here we go.
I've got my penetrant spray. I'm just going to start spraying things that I know I'm going to be taking apart. Okay. I'm going to take the upper ball joint apart. Separate that from the knuckle. At some point, we'll be taking these out. You can give him a little spritz if you want. This nut right here is going to come off. Give that a spritz over here. The bolt. Okay, this is going to come off.
We're going to let the penetrant do its job while we're focusing on what else we're going to do. Okay? This bolt right here, this comes through the lower part of the strut, goes through the lower control arm bushing, comes out this side. Then there's a nut on the backside. So I'm going to spray that. I'm going to spray the nut for the sway bar link. We'll let all that do its soaking and we'll start removing things.
Make sure I pay attention to what's going to be happening, right? So if I remove this upper ball joint nut, which we're going to need to do, so we can pull this down to get room to get the axle out. I pull this down, it's going to put a tug. It's going to tug on this. There really isn't much give there. It's going to put a tug on this. Okay? So that's why I sprayed all these things down. I'm going to remove this 10. there's a 10 mil bolt right here, 10, 10 we'll slide this out of the way. Slide this out of the way. Give us plenty of slack for when this comes down in the process of what we're doing. So I'll grab my 10 and we'll move along.
I've got my 10 millimeter. I'm using my air gun. You can use a ratchet, like I said already, I'm just going to put it on and zip these out. Look at all that slack we have now. That's going to be great. Come over here. This is a nut. Get that off of there. Do this one. Perfect. Now we got plenty of slack there too. We're doing pretty good. Let's move along.
So here we go. Now we're going to remove this cotter pin right here. It's just a flimsy piece of metal, nothing really too crazy about it. I like to use some cutters. If you don't have access to extra cotter pins, you're probably to want to try to save it. I do have access to new ones and I will be using a new one, but the purpose of the video, I'll just try showing you how to get it out, hopefully without breaking it too much. So there it is. Okay. If you need to reuse it, well you do you, booboo. I'm going to replace it.
Now we're going to use our 17 millimeter. We're going to remove this nut right here. I left it on just a little bit and give it a couple more threads. Now I'm going to take my big fabulous hammer. I'm going to whack right here on the knuckle. I'm going to be careful not to hit this boot too much. I definitely don't want to put a hole in that, obviously. I don't want to damage the upper control arm, or I also don't want to hit the stud right here and this nut, so it's all stuff to think about. You don't want to hit here, here, here, here, anywhere, but right there. Okay. I got my big fabulous hammer. I'm going to hit right here, being careful of the boot, the stud, the control arm. Okay? I'm just going to try to whack it.
It broke free. I've got a gap there. Now what am I going to do, I'm going to pull down on this. Take off this nut right here. I'll show you what it looks like. It's just a castle nut. It's got slots in it. Those slots you see is for the cotter pin to go through the hole in the upper ball joint. Not sure if you can see it, but there's a hole where the cotter pin goes through, has to line up with one of these slots. Okay? Once we torque it down, I'll tell you about that.
We're going to go ahead and we're going to loosen up this nut right here. It's a 32 millimeter, but before we go too far, I'm just going to hang this with something. Whatever you might have. I've got a little hooky tool. Just going to put it there and I don't know, right there. Cool. 32 millimeter, and then reverse that off. So here we go. 32 on my air gun, you can use a ratchet. You do you, booboo.
There it is. Okay. Next thing we're going to want to do. We're going to put a little bit of penetrate in here. We're going to let it do its magic. We're not reusing this axle, so you don't really don't have to worry about, normally if you were reusing the axle, you would put this nut back on quite a bit. Then you could hit it with the hammer. You don't have to worry about damaging any threads or you can do with the way that I'm actually going to do it anyway. I'm just going to use my air chisel and the center punch. I'm going to go right there and drive it through. Okay, so like I said, grabbed some of my penetrant. Put that on there. Got My air chisel and my air hose here. Here it is. Center Punch can go right here. I've got my safety glasses on just in case anything happens. I'm just going to drive it through.
Seems pretty good. I know it's not going anywhere. Perfect. Now we can move on to the next step. So here we go. We've got our 17 millimeter nut here and we've got the bolt that comes through on the other side of the 17 as well. So I'm going to use a wrench on the bolt side and use a 17 millimeter socket on this side. I'm going to remove it wearing my safety glasses, of course.
That's what our nut looks like. Does this spin? Spins pretty good. Sometimes you'll find that the bolt really doesn't want to spin, in which case, generally speaking, it's frozen in the bushing that runs through the control arm. If that was the case, that's a project for another day. We're pretty lucky on this vehicle. It's not. So lucky me. Lucky Len. I'm going to take our nut that we just took off. I'm going to put it back on a few good threads. Here we are. Now I'm going to take my hammer. I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks. I want to try to drive it out. Okay. The reason for putting on the nut is just so I don't damage my threads and make it impossible for myself to put the nut on later on down the line.
So here we go. Cool. Moved pretty easy. Now that I know it moves like a dead, I can gently tap it and I can use my punch. It's going to drive it through. It's going to come out the other end. It's going to hit the floor, so I just want to make sure there's nothing over there. Maybe you're on the ground and I hit your face. Here we go. Let's give a little wiggle. It doesn't want to come out by wiggling. You can always just try to unscrew it. So there's our bolt. Comes through from the front to the rear, essentially like this.
Okay, so we've got the lower part of our strut right here. It comes down as a fork like this and it goes around our control arm, which basically sits like this. I want to go like this up against my sway bar link and up against one side of my fork.
I just want to try to pull it. I want to try to get it all the way over here somehow. That way there, it'll make it so I can get my axle out. Okay, so I'm going to go like this, now it's unlatched. I can get this sway bar link net off of here. Then we're going to take down our knuckle. We're going to pull it back and we're going to drive our axle completely out. Okay? We'll have it out of the wheel bearing and everything and we can go to the transmission side after that. So right here, 15 millimeter, I'm going to blast this out. If you can't blast it out, you can try using an Allen head, stick it in there and use a wrench to take this off. That's the harder way. So best of luck if that's the way you're doing it. Here we go. Safety glasses on.
Just a 15 millimeter head. Set that aside, I'm going to take our sway bar link, see if we can get it out of the control arm. If it doesn't want to go, you can just use a pry bar. So what I'm doing at this point is essentially just getting this out of the control arm. Whatever you have to do to get that done. I'm going to grab this. I'm going to try to get my little hooky-doo out of here. It's just holding it so it doesn't come down and hit me in the face. Here we are. Now I'm going to try to force my axle through.
Let's give it a couple of little wiggles here. Pretty cool. Make sure I'm not putting any unneeded pressure on any of my hoses or my lines. I got plenty of slack. It looks like I'm doing all right still. So now I'm just going to try to force stuff around and try to get this axle out and down and out here. I'm going to go over to the transmission and we'll get it out of that side. Okay. Very careful for hoses and ABS wires. We're replacing the axle, so that's nice. We don't have to worry too much about that.
Okay, so we've got this hanging out here. Now once we pop it free from over there, it should come out pretty easily. Actually, I'm going to bring this back up over here. It looks better here. Now I've got more slack, so now when I go pop it out of the transmission, I'm going to have some area for it to go to. Right? Shoved in down there, it might not have come out so easily. Anyways, so now we got it here, we still got plenty of slack, right? If you're worried about it, you can try to tie this up. Just as long as you don't have any unneeded stress on your lines or your ABS wire, you're good to go.
So we've got our tool, we've got this right here. This is a part that can be bought right at 1A Auto. I highly recommend it because what it does is it wedges in between the transmission and the axle. Then you just drive it right up and it does all the hard work for you. Just separated that nice and easy. I'm going to stick it up in there. Cool.
All right, now we'll come back over here. We'll get our axle up and out of here and we'll move along. So now I'm just going to grab the axle. Let me see if I can work it out. So this being the longer of the two axles can make it a little bit difficult. If we were doing the driver's side, you wouldn't have to deal with the majority of all this. See, now, we're at the point where we've got the little fork here, so what we're going to have to do is just try to finagle it. And be careful of our fenders and all that, obviously. Just going to try to get it down through our fork. Here we are. Now we've removed our passenger side axle.
Here we go. Friends, a quick product comparison for you. We've got our old axle. This is the right side axle out of a 2007 Honda accord. It's a fairly easy job to do. We just pulled it out. We have our brand new quality 1A Auto part here. I just wanted to show you a quick comparison to let you know things to look for when you're comparing them. You've got your shafts over here. Okay. This is the side that's going to go through the wheel bearing. Then this is where the nuts going to obviously ride, get a brand new nut that's always nice. You want to make sure that you've got splined ends. The splined ends are the same exact length. Okay. And of course the same width. I mean, it'd be hard to kind of gauge it, but they look about the same. If you have one that's fatter or longer, you got an issue.
You come over to the other side, you're looking at the same thing. We've got our shaft over here and our shaft right there. You want to make sure that these are about the same length. If you've got one shorter or longer, shorter, whatever, you've got, thicker, it looks wrong. It's wrong. Okay? If you have a new one and it's longer than what the old one was, it's going to go too far into your transmission. That's going to cause an issue. If it's shorter, it's not going to go far enough in. That'll also cause an issue. So you want to make sure that those are the same exact length. Okay?
So moving along, what we'll notice is that the length of the axles, they're about the same length. If it seems like ones may be like a quarter inch longer or an eighth of an inch longer than the other, it's only because, well, they expand and they contract. Okay? The shafts can go in and out a little bit. That's what they're supposed to do. Okay. Your old one, same thing. So if you've got one that's contracted and one that's expanded, well of course one's going to be the different length. Okay? So as long as they're approximately approximately the same length and these shafts are all the same, you're doing all right. So with all that said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a great quality part to put into your vehicle. So if you need this or any other part, you can always check us out 1aauto.com. Thanks
We're going to make sure that our axles nice and clean right along here. This is where our seal's going to ride. Okay? If you have Vaseline or some sort of silicone paste, you can just put a little bit along here. This is just going to help when you're installing the axle to slide into the seal. Once we get that all in nice and smooth, we want to make sure that there isn't any dirt. Of course. We'll set this aside and then we're going to check that axle seal, make sure it's not ripped or torn or anything like that. If it is, we'll want to replace it. Let's take a look at that. We'll set this aside and we'll move along.
So here we go. We're at the transmission. This is the seal where your axle is going to go into. It's going to drive right into there. You can see the splines. Okay. So we want to check this seal. The way to do that would just be to use your finger and your eyes, of course. Just feel around, see if you feel any splits or cracks, anything that might catch your eye. This one looks like it's in really good condition. If it wasn't, you'd want to replace this because you don't want any moisture or dirt getting inside your transmission. That'll be a costly repair right there, and or replacement. So it looks good to me.
I'd say now we're clear to grab that axle and we'll slide it in and we'll keep on rolling. So I've got my big old axle. I've got my wishbone area on the bottom of this strut assembly. I'm just going to bring it in. I'm going to get the axle resting in there. Essentially what I want to do is get the axle to go down where it's supposed to go. We'll lift this up, try to get my little hooky-doo out of here, being careful not to put any tugs on anything, right? You just got to keep being careful of that. Super important.
We'll get this down pretty close to where it's going to go. Now what I'm going to want to do is I need to get my axle in between here. So you need to do whatever your scenario is. Just be careful not to pull on this. Careful not to pull on this. Might make it easiest to just go ahead and drive in the axle first and then hopefully this will push in far enough to get it down under here and then over. If you were going to do that, just use something as simple as a rubber mallet. Okay. We're just going to whack it in. Now I'm going to see if I can get my axle up and through here.
Right. Whooee! Tell you what. Get that off of there. Set this aside. Okay. Trying to get this down lower, because I need to get this up and over here. So we do whatever we can. If it's easier, I'm just going to show you, we'll just take off this caliper right here and we'll hang it up and out of the way. That'll give us all sorts of play area to be able to do things. So I'll just show you how to remove those and we'll go from there.
Okay, so here we go. I'm going to remove this right here. This right here. I'm going to use a small pry bar. I'm just going to try to pop this caliper out of the way. There's going to be brake pads that are in there. If they come out, just remember which way they came out. That's the way you're going to put them back in. We still got plenty of slack here. Everybody can see it. Maybe you have to remove the caliper. Maybe you don't. It all just kind of depends on what's going on for you and your situation. You don't want to just let this hang down. Put a tug on your brake hose. This is a high pressure hose right here. Last thing you want is any tugs, bubbles, cracks, splits, whatevers. Here's our pads.
Do that. Not that you really have to worry about it cause the brackets on there. So you put this on. That'll just kind of hold the rotor from wobbling around too much in case there's a lot of rust. You don't want rust getting between the hub and the rotor. So if you can prevent that, that'd be good as well.
All right, so I'm just going to pop the axle back free again. Okay, so I'm going to use my little pickle fork tool here. All right. Now I'm going to come back up there. Right now is just basically about getting the axle, this axle in between here, essentially, so you're going to have to figure out for your application how to get it done. Every car might be the same car, but they all act a little different I guess in certain situations. Right? Want to be very careful to hopefully not damage my boot at all. Obviously, I don't want to damage my brand new boot. Try to work it up in there. There we are. Cool.
Okay. Now I'm going to get the axle back up into the hole. I'm going to make sure that it's getting in there and I'm going to push it back through again with my rubber mallet and we'll get going on putting all the rest of this back together. So here we go. I'm just going to get the axle getting close. I'm going to go ahead and spray this with a little bit of a Never Seize. It's going to help me out down the line or whoever the next person is that's going to take this apart. Whether it's for an axle or a wheel bearing or whatever it is they might be doing. Grab my Copper Never Seize. Just give a little spritz. There we are. Grab my knuckle. Get it kind of working into where it's going to be. There it is. Cool. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this sway bar link down here. Try to lift this up enough to get my sway bar link stud through there.
It's pretty close. Might be able to hammer it in or I don't know. Yours might even just slide right in. That's probably just my sway bar link that's causing issues. There we are. Let me go ahead and tighten this up. It's a 15 millimeter. Nice and snug. Okay, so we're going to go for this now. Okay. I'm going to try to line up this hole with that hole. It's going to go through and through the other side of the little fork here. Alright.
I've got a little tool. Might make things a little bit easier for us. It's just a Phillips head screwdriver. You can use whatever you've got. You might just have something that's pointy. Essentially, I'm going to go through the hole in the fork and then through this. I'm going to use this to work it around so I can get my bolt through. Okay. Before that, I'm going to take off my nut, of course. I'm going to spray the shank area of this with some Copper Never Seize. That's just going to make it nice, easy to take back off someday down the line. A lot of times these bolts right here will freeze up in the bushings right here inside the control arm, cause issues.
So here we go. See if I can get the fork over the bushing area first. There we go. Let's see if we can get this worked in here. Okay. So we got this pretty much lined up.
I'm going to try to line up the other side of the hole real quick. Use something different on this side. I'm going to put it through from front to back. As I push this through, it might push the screwdriver through. Okay. We are cruising. Looks pretty good. Bonk. Here we are.
We've got our 17 millimeter nut. Go ahead and put this on here. Now when I zip this on, I'm pretty much just going to bottom it out because I want to make sure I torque this down. Okay. There is a torque specifications for it, so we want to use it on that. We're going to use it on the upper ball joint. We're going to especially use it on the lug nuts and the axle nut. Okay? 17 on the bolt side, 17 on the nut side. My safety glasses, of course.
Okay, bottomed it out. We'll go get the torque spec for that. We'll torque it down and we'll move along. There we go. We're going to torque this down to 47 foot pounds. We've got our inner pad. We can tell because it has a circle. That's where the piston of the caliper rides on. Right there, outer pad. Get that on there.
Star caliper. Take a peak. It's not leaking. Looks fairly decent. Just going to slide it right back over these pads. Get them lined up. We got our two bolts, just 12 millimeter heads on those, so nothing too crazy. They're not super thick bolts either, so you definitely don't want to hammer them down with like a half inch guns, but if you had something small like this, you can just blast them on real quick.
Okay. We're going to go ahead and put our upper ball joint stud down through. There's the hole that I was talking about. Here's our nut. It's got slots, right? I'm just going to get it lined up. Keep it in there. Slotted side goes down. Going to bottom it out. Now we're going to torque it to 35 foot pounds. Once we do that, we'll check to see where the slots line up with the cotter pin hole. If they don't line up perfectly, we're going to tighten it a little bit further until it gets to the closest slot. You never want to loosen it. Okay? Just tighten it to the next spot. So I'll grab my torque wrench, 35 foot pounds with my 17 millimeter socket.
Do it one more time. Looks pretty good. All right. Looks like it's just barely passed it, of course. So we're just going to bring it to the next slot, like I said. torque wrench doesn't like doing that, but whatever.
Here we are. We've got our hole going through. Got our cotter pin. Put it through the hole, this side right here, we just want to bend out of the way. Okay. Or bend down or bend wherever, but basically, just make sure it's bent. Okay. You can bend it in any direction you want. You can bend one one way, one the other if you want and make it look pretty or symmetrical or whatever you want. It just has to be bent. All that cotter pin does, does it make sure that this nut can't loosen up over time and your ball joint can separate from your knuckle, which would cause a big issue driving down the road, obviously.
Okay, so we're moving along. We've got these right here. Everything else. Let's take a look. It feels like it's tightened. We did all these, we did that bolt down there. We didn't take off the outer tie rod end. Cool. So I'm going to grab some of my Copper Never Seize. I'm going to spray the areas that those bolts go into, just so they come out nice and easy the next time. A lot of times they'll break coming out. We got very lucky on this car.
You want to make sure, oops. I'll grab that in a second. You want to make sure that if any of these mounting bolts broke, your hose is still secured and of course your ABS wire is secured. If it wasn't and it was just dangling around or could get caught on your wheel. That's going to become an issue, so you want to make sure that it's secured. You can use something like a wire tie or whatever you have access to. Just make sure that they're secured. Okay, to shorten the story. It just has a little prong here, just goes up in the hole in the control arm. Put my nut on there. I got my last bolt, put it in there, 10 millimeter.
Everything's nice and secured. Looking pretty good. All that's going to be left, just to go ahead and we're going to snug up this axle nut here. We're just basically going to bottom it out and then we're going to torque it down. Okay, so you're going to use your 32 or your hands, whatever you've got. Go like that. We'll get it down closer to the ground and I'll show you how to torque it down. We're going to go ahead and we're going to tighten this up to 134 foot pounds, using our 32 millimeter axle nut socket. We are just going to hit it one more time. Cool. Now there's a little slot in our axle right there. We're going to take a punch and we're going to try to drive this part of our nut into that slot and that's just going to lock it in. Okay? So I'm going to grab a punch and a hammer and we'll get that done.
So I've got a punch. I'm going to try to drive this into that slot right there. Best I can, at least. All I want to do is make sure that this not can't spin on its own, over time. It's going nowhere. Perfect. We'll get this lug nut off of here. I'm going to grab the wheel. I'm going to lift with my leg and my abs. Get it up on here. We've got my one lug nut with my 19 millimeter socket. Just going to get us started on there. Now I can release the wheel, I'll get my other four started, we'll bottom them out, and then we're going to go ahead and torque them down to 80 foot pounds. I just bottomed them out in a star pattern real quick. Now when I torque them, I'm going to do the same thing. It's important to go in a star pattern and not just around in a circle so you don't have your wheel off kilter. Time to torque these puppies. Star pattern, like I said, 19 millimeter socket. Here we go.
I'm just going to go around again. All right. Now we've completed our service.
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Tools used
Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on 2007 Honda Accord. We're going to be doing a left front axle. It's going to be a fairly easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it, so if you need any parts you can always check us out 1AAuto.com thanks.
I've got the majority of the weight of the vehicle up off the ground right now. I set it up on our lift on the contact points. It's nice and safe. It can't go anywhere. I have the wheel just barely touching the ground so that when I'm loosening our lug nuts, the wheel won't be able to spin. All right. But I don't want all the way to the lyrical on there, I just want a little bit, just enough to hold it. I'm going to turn these to the left with my 19mm socket. I'm just breaking them free. Then we'll remove them. Once we get it up in the air. There we are. Now we can move along.
Now I'm going to continue taking off these lug nuts. If you have an air gun, you can go ahead and do that, it might be a little quicker. Essentially, just get off all your lug nuts and then you can move on to the next step. I'm going to take off this last lug nut. I'm holding my wheel. There it is. Take the wheel off. We'll set it aside.
All right, so our next step, we're going to analyze our situation. What we're going to have to do is we're going to have to take off this nut right here. This is the axle nut. That's going to come at some point. The knuckle, we're going to relieve this nut right here. It's going to let the knuckle come down, so that'll put pressure here if we don't have this nut off. Also, it'll put a tug on this hose and your ABS wire if you're not careful. We're just going to be preemptive and make sure that we don't hurt these at all, and all I'm going to do is I'm going to remove them from the knuckle. 10mm, 10mm, 10mm, 10mm, okay. If you have access to an air gun you can use that, or if you have a ratchet use that, but it's a 10mm.
There we are. That's going to give us plenty of slack for when this comes down. Perfect. Get this bolt out of here. Come around the back side, there's a 10 right here, right about here on the inside there. That relieves that. If you want a little bit more slack you can go ahead and do this one. Okay, now we've got plenty of slack. We got the bolt that came through this side, and we've got the nut that one right there, and then of course two bolts over there.
Okay, so next what we're going to remove is this right here. This is a bolt that goes through this. This is the lower part of your struck by the way through the control arm bushing, and then through the other part of the lower part of your strut, and then there's a nut on the backside which is also a 17. I'm just going to take my 17mm wrench. I'm going to hold the bolt head. When you use my air gun on the other side, you can use a ratchet if you want, 17, and I'm going to blast it in reverse or to the left. There we are, get that off of there.
I'm just going to take this nut that we just took off. I'm just going to start it back on a few threads, give it a few good threads, and then I'm going to take my hammer and I'm just going to give it a couple bonks and try to drive the bolt out. Once it moves freely, then I can go ahead and use a chisel and put it out the rest of the way. Here we go. Got my 17mm nut on there. I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks with my hammer. There we are. It's pushing the bolt through. Very good. Did what I asked it to do. I'm just going to grab my 17 again. Get this nut back off. The reason for putting on the nut when I did that was just so I didn't munge up the threads. That'll become an issue. So if it was frozen in there, you'd have to worry about it. Where it's not, I'm not really very worried about it. Just do that.
I've got my chisel. This is going to come out the other end, so you want to make sure that you know you don't have anything down there that might get hurt. Like If you're working on the ground, you might have your face under there. There we are. There's our bolt. I'm just going to set this aside.
The next thing that I want to do is I want to carefully try to pry between here and here. I just want to pull this part of the lower strut away just so I can get a swivel socket on there, and I want to try to take this nut off the sway bar link, and then I'm going to push the sway bar link out of the way and that should give us a little bit of throw with the lower control arm once we get the upper off here. Okay? Let's see if this works to our advantage. Perfect. I should be able to get in there. Let's take a look at what we got.
I've got a 15mm swivel, it's going to be like this. Once again, you can use a ratchet if you want. There we are. A ratchet might be a little bit harder than an air gun, so take that into consideration. If you look right inside there, you can see that there's like an Allen head key, so if you needed to and you were struggling trying to get this nut off and it's just spinning this shaft right here, because that's what they do, they spin, it's just a ball and socket in there. You would hold that and then use a wrench to turn this off. Okay? 15mm to get that off. This is out of our way now. Now we can move ahead.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this axle nut right here, and then I'm going to remove this right here, and we should be able to swing this down far enough. If we can't get far enough down, we'll just remove this right here, which is your outer tie rod nut, and then we should definitely have enough room to be able to swing this down. We'll try to get the axle out and out on the other end after that.
Here's our axle nut. We're going to use a 32mm socket. We're going to turn it counterclockwise to remove it. There it is. Okay. Let's see if we can push in the axle. We can't. There's multiple options we can do here. Firstly, you're going to spray it obviously with some kind of penetrate inside there. Try to get it worked in. Okay. If you have a center punch, maybe like an air chisel with a center punch, you can try to go right in there and that'll help push it through. If you don't have access to something like that, I would just go ahead and I'd take my nut and I would, I'm going to turn it to the left a little bit to get it started, but put it back on so that it's pretty much flush. Pretty close. Then I'm just going to hit this with my hammer and bonk it through enough to break it free. Okay?
First step, like I said, we're going to put a little penetrant in there. I have access to an air chisel, so I'm going to go ahead and do that, but if you don't, just make sure that you use your old nut, you put it on there, because once you peen this over, you're going to have a real hard time dealing with that. Not that it's really too big of an issue because we're going to be replacing the axle anyway, but if you weren't replacing the axle and you were just doing the bearing or whatever your job might be for a different situation, you don't want to peen it over. Replacing the axle, I guess do whatever you want.
I'm going to go ahead with my air chisel. Of course I'm wearing hand protection and eye protection. Safety first, number one concern here at 1A Auto. I'm just going to drive this through. Perfect. We don't want to go too much further than that because at this point we're going to be contracting the axle. Once it gets to the full point of being contracted, it's going to want to keep pushing and where's it going to go? Into the transmission? Okay? Let's not break any transmission parts today. That's a story for another day, not today.
I'm going to get this cotter pin out of here ,and then I'm going to take this nut off right here, and then we're going to try to bring this down. Like I said, if it doesn't come down far enough that I can pull it down and get the axle out, I might have to take off the outer tire rod nut. We'll see. Let's do as little as possible though. Here's our cotter pin, okay? It's just this little a pin, really. I'll show you what it looks like in a second here.
All I'm going to do, I'm going to take the little ears, I'm going to try to bend them down. Let's see if I can get it. There we are. Okay. Just going to work it around. I can see this and moving right there, so that means that the cotter pin is ready to come out, so that's nice. Now I want to try to straighten out those little years as much as possible and then I want to grab this end. Just pull it out. I like to grab it and then pry up against things if use cutters, it's usually pretty good. Also, if you have access to new cotter pins, it's always a good idea to have a new one just in case something like that happens. They get pretty rusted and they break. It is what it is, so I'll just replace that. Just going to get all these right out of here. Okay.
Now I want to get my socket on there. Let's see what size it is. 17. okay. I've got a swivel, I've got my air gun, you can use your ratchet. You do you, booboo. Eyeglasses on. Here we are. Here's our castle nut. Okay. I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to start back on there a little bit. I'm going to grab my hammer. I'm going to hit right here on the knuckle. I'm going to be careful not to break my boot, I don't want to pinch that in any way, and I don't really want to hit on the control arm so much as just the knuckle itself, okay? And if you can avoid hitting the nut and or the stud under there, that would be wonderful.
I've got my big fabulous hammer. I'm going to try to whack just on the knuckle here like I said, trying not to hit the control arm, the boot, this, really anything, right? Maybe you got your cable up here. I mean obviously you'd see that, but whatever. Just make sure it's out of the way, okay? Try to hit right here and we're going to hopefully break this free. Once it falls down and hits this nut then we can stop hitting it because it's broken free, and we'll move along, okay? There we are. Grab my control arm. Just pull it down. Okay.
Cool. We are cruising looking good. Now we just need to get our axle the rest of the way out of the wheel bearing here. Now that I've got this down quite a bit, we've still got plenty of slack on everything, right, because we don't have these attached. Imagine if we did, right? We're ripping things. We'll just try to drive the axle the rest of the way out of the bearing and once we do that we should be able to slide it down and out of the little forkey end of the strut assembly, and then once it's out of there, we'll pop it out of the transmission.
Here we go. I've got my air chisel again, my safety glasses, of course. I'm going to continue driving this axle up and out of the bearing. That's pretty good. Let's see if it gave us enough. Very nice. This car is loving me today. Perfect. Get that out of the way. Okay. Now I'm going to lift the vehicle up a little bit higher. I'm going to get under there and I'm going to try to separate the axle from the transmission. It'll pop out and then it'll just come right out this way. Okay?
Our quality tool set that we have from 1A Auto comes with two different types of forks. We've got one that's angled and we've got one like this. Sometimes you'll get an axle that gives you a lot of space where you have to have a spacer, that would be what this one would be, and then you just drive this one up in between, and that'll help force the axle out from in between the transmission in the axle itself, I guess. It'll help drive the axle out we'll say, okay? For this application, all I need is the one, the angled one. Okay, so I'm going to use this and I'm going to use my hammer. I'm going to try to get right up in here. This is the axle and this is the super expensive transmission, so we're going to be very careful not to damage this. We don't really care so much about the axle, right? Because, well, we're replacing it. I'm just going to try and get this in between the axle and the transmission and I'm going to try to break it free. I'm going to try to pry now. Okay.
You can see there's a little bit of a gap there. That's good news. Now I'm going to try to pull the axle out. Okay. You can continue with the same thing if you want to, you could even use the the wider one at this point. Just get it in there. Okay? Now we'll remove our axle. And there we are, left front axle removed.
Here we go, friends, a quick product comparison for you. We have our left front axle out of our 2007 Honda Accord. We just removed it, it was fairly easy. I just wanted to show you what it looks like compared to our brand new quality 1A Auto part here. I just want to make sure you understand that the length is important, right? We've got this part right here. The shaft that goes into the transmission is the same length, it matches up perfectly. If this was longer on the new one or the old one, well, you'd have the wrong part. As you can tell, it matches up. We can come along. We'll get to the other end. These match up as well. We've got the splined end, it came with a brand new nut. That's always wonderful. You want to make sure that this part right here is the same length as well. If this one was this long or this one's this long, you've got an issue. This looks the exact same. Okay? I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a perfect part to install in your vehicle.
Something to take note of, though, is that these axles do expand a little bit. They expand and contract. So if you're looking at your axle and one maybe seems like it's quite a bit longer, you know it's extended out further than the other one, well that's not really so much of an issue, because it just contracts. Okay? You can put them both in contract mode there, or extended mode, whatever you want to do, but the main thing that really matters is that the overall length is about the same, but this length right here and this is the same, and this one right here and this right here is the same. Okay?
Another great thing to notice is the new one doesn't have this dampener right here, which you might think that, "Oh no, it should have it," but really this is an issue. A lot of Honda's had an issue with water getting underneath here, rotting out, and axles breaking, and that might even be the reason why you're replacing this axle. We did away with it. You don't need it. I would say we're going to go ahead and install this quality part. And if you need this part or any other part, you can always check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks!
The next thing we're going to do now that we have the axle out, we're just going to take a look at our seal, which is this right here. Okay? It's nice, rubber, it should be super soft and pliable. If it seems like it's hardened, or cracked, dry rotted, split in any way, you'd want to replace that, which is fairly easy to do on these. This one right here is actually in great condition, so I'm not going to worry about replacing it. Something else to note would be if you pulled the axle and a lot of transmission fluid came out, you would want to make sure that you, of course, double check your transmission fluid and put it back up to par. Okay? Fluid comes out, fluid needs to go in. All right? It's always a good habit to check your transmission fluid anyways, but if fluid came out, you need to really check your transmission fluid. Okay?
We know the seals good. We can use a little bit of if you wanted to and you had maybe some Vaseline, or silicone, something like that, you could put a little bit along the seal just to keep it lubricated. Then we're going to take our new quality 1A Auto axles, and we're going to put it right in there, and we'll get it all mounted up. I've got a little bit of silicone right here. If you had Vaseline, that would probably work a little bit better, because it'll just melt down and dissipate a little bit. This is just going to help the axle slide in around that seal without hopefully damaging it in any way. We want that seal to stay nice and good up there, okay? We've got that in there.
We're going to have a rubber mallet ready. I'm going to put the axle back in the way that I took it out, right in through up here. Let's see if I can get it weaseled in, being careful for my seal. Like I said, that's super important. Here we go, I got it lined up. Now I'm going to get this down to working height. I've got my nut on there so I can't damage any threads. I'm going to use my rubber mallet, bonk, bonk. I'm going to bonk it in. Once it bottoms out in here, right back where we were looking at before, that should be pretty much right up against the transmission by the time we're done. Okay? Once it clips in, we're done with that and we'll move along to the next step.
I've got my rubber mallet, I've got my note on here. Not that I could probably damage any metal threads with my rubber mallet, but just in case. Now I'm just going to go ahead and drive this into the transmission. I'm going to wait until I feel it pop and snap in. Then I'm going to go under and I'm just going to take a peek, make sure the axle is right up against the transmission, it's not sitting this far away anymore, it should be pretty much right up against? okay. Okay. That felt like it went in pretty good. I'm just going to put this down. I can give this a little shake. It feels good.
Now what we're going to do, we're going to get this off. We're going to put the axle back through our wheel bearing right here. Okay? Then we'll start putting back together pretty much the opposite direction then we took it apart. All right, so now I'm going to use a little bit of copper never seize. I'm just going to try to spray it right on the splines right here. This is just going to help it come out sometime in the future in case we ever have to do, you know, an axle, or a wheel bearing, or anything that we have to take us back apart, this'll come out of the wheel bearing easier next time, okay? Just a little bit. It doesn't have to be anything too crazy and I don't really need to get it on the threads right here. It's okay if you do. It's not the end of the world, but we don't need to, basically.
Now I'm just going to try and get this down, see if I can move this enough. Come on. Okay. Let me get it back up and through here, being careful not to mess up my boot. Just try to squish it. Just squeeze it up through here. Like I said, I want to be careful not to mess up my boot. The last thing you want is moisture or anything getting in here. That's a brand new boot and I don't know if you want to watch my video on how to do the axle again, but I guess if that is the case then go ahead and do that. Anyway, I can get this through here. Get that lined up. I'm just going to wiggle it. If you wanted to, you could put a not on here. The only problem with putting the nut on there is if this was to drop back down, the axle is going to want to pull from someplace, so you take the risk of pulling your axle joint right here apart. If you want until we get the rest of it situated, you can just leave that not off and floating. Basically, you just want to have the axle sitting in there for now.
I'm going to see about winding up this little wishbone fork here. You might have to use something like a pry bar. Just give it a little twist. You know, there's lots of things that might be going on with your particular situation that might be different from mine. But for me, this fork right here is kind of twisted, so I need to deal with that. I'm just going to get this back up and sitting up here just so I don't have to keep holding onto the knuckle. Okay? Now I don't have to worry about it flopping down, hitting me in the face, or hurting me anyway. I can try to figure out this situation. What I need to do is I need to twist this, get it lined up with this hole, then I'm going to get that long bolt, I'm going to start bringing it through here, through there. I'm not going to really push it out all the way yet, because what I want to make sure I do is put this sway bar link nut back on while I still have access to it.
All right. I'm going to use a little bit more copper never seize. I'm just going to coat this bolt right here. This is where it goes through the bushing in the lower control arm. Generally speaking, it'll be going through like this, and right inside here, these things are almost always seize up, so we got very lucky that this came out. It kind of looks like it was getting to be on its way. I'm just going to spray it with some never seize, and this is going to make somebody's life a lot easier down the line. You're welcome. Okay.
Now, I'm going to grab my control arm, and I'm going to try to lift this up, and try to lift the control arm up so it meets up with this, line up those holes, and put the bolt through. Here we go. Wish me luck. This little piece right here is going to come off, so I'll just get it out of the way now. See if I can get them lined up.
Let's think if this isn't working right? Which it isn't. I'll show you something that you can try. I'm going to use my Phillips head screwdriver. I'm not going to be using it for what it's intended for, there's no screws right here that I'm going to be undoing, so it might get damaged. That's something to think about. You do you, booboo. But basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to line up these two holes with this, because it's pointy. Once I lift it up, I'm going to try to shove this through from the backside, right? I'm going to get everything so it's lining up and I'm going to keep that in there so I can move things around a little bit to get my bolt through. Okay? That's my plan. Stick with me, kid.
Let's see if we can get it. Okay. That's through there now and I'm going to make sure that this thing can't fall down, just like that. Now I'm going to try to see it through this hole right here and see what I need to do to line it up. What you might have to do might be a little bit different than what I have to do.
I'm just going to try to tap it in. That went through pretty good, so now I'm just going to bring it back out a little bit. There we are. I can do this link. I'll put it back through here, get my nut on, and then I can push this the rest of the way. Tighten this up. I'm going to torque it, of course. Then we'll move along to tightening up the rest, okay?
We've got our sway bar link. That's going to come through this hole right here. It's going to come through. I'm going to you use my nut for this application, it's a 15mm. Just going to see if I can line it up. The shaft does move around, so it doesn't line up perfectly with the hole, just move it around. It's just the ball and socket, okay? Easy peasy. Put that on there. Now I'm going to blast this on with my 15 swivel. Let's see if I can do it. All right.
I'm going to go ahead and tighten this up. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to show you, I'm going to try and get my Allen head in there, and I'm going to use a 15 ratchet or a ratchet wrench, I mean. I'm going to try to tighten it down that way just to show you what it'll be like, you know, trying to do it with this in here. Okay? All right, it'll hold the inside of that sway bar link. I'm using a 3/16ths Allen head right there. I going right in the center. I'm going to use my ratchet wrench. You can use whatever you've got. 15mm for this application. I'm going to hold the stud still with the Allen head and just tighten the nut down. Nice and tight. Let's get our stuff out of here. There we are. Now we'll just drive this the rest of the way through. We'll tighten that up or snug it up a little bit and then we'll torque it down.
I'm going to drive this through. There we are. I'm going to use my 17mm nut there. I'm just going to just going to tighten it down. Just pretty much bottom it out, okay? I'm going to use my 17 wrench on the backside there. Snug this up just so it bottoms out, and then we're going to torque it to 47 foot pounds. All right, here we go. I'm going to torque this down to 47 foot pounds. There we are. I'm just going to to do it one more time.
Okay. That's nice and torqued. We tightened this down. We didn't remove this. We've got a couple of bolts there, a couple of bolts over here, and then this right here. Let's keep rolling.
Okay. I'm going to get back off of here. It could have been harder. We've got our slotted ball joint nut. I'm just going to get this started on here. I'm going to turn a little bit to the left just to find the beginning thread and then I'm going to go right. I'm just going to bottom this out. I'm going to torque this down to 35 foot pounds. If it doesn't line up the slot with the hole that's in there. I'm just going to bring it to the next available hole, continuing tightening, I'm not going to loosen it to the next hole, I'm just going to tighten it. Okay? It's probably pretty close. Get it going here. Just get it down to 35. There we go. Okay. It looks like we're just past the hole, which is kind of a bummer, but it's okay. I'm just going to bring it, like I said, to the very next hole. Torque wrench is barking at me. That's okay. Here we are.
Now I'm going to put my cotter pin through. Brand new, put a little bit of goo on it. It should just go right through. If it gives you a struggle bonk it. I'm going to grab the ears. I'm just going to pull them around. You can put one on one side, one on the other, you can bring one down here, one over, whatever you want to do. All that matters is that it's peened over and this cotter pin cannot come out on its own. This locks in this nut and the nut holds this ball joint together. If this comes apart driving down the road, it's bad news for everybody. Okay? Here we go. We've got that done. Nice and torqued.
This is done. This is done. We're looking pretty great here. Let's get some small bolts in here. We'll get a nut on here. We'll torque it all up and then we can get the wheel on. I've got my bolts and my nuts. I'm just going to use a little bit of copper never seize. I love this stuff. It just makes my life easier down the line, or the next person's life, or next person job, whatever. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Get that up here. This one, let's see if I can get it through. Make sure I get that bracket. It has a little ear. The ear just sits in the hole. It's very important to make sure that you have all these things secured. Sometimes what you might notice is maybe this bolt broke, this one broke, or any of them broke, right?
Down here, you're pretty lucky if one broke, you've still got another one and holds it secured. You could probably get away with that. But if your brake line wasn't secured and it's just doing this, you need to figure out a way to get it to stay. You could use something like a wire tie. Just try to get it on there basically just so this can't move around, get caught in your wheel, get caught in your axle, I don't know. Just doing what it's not supposed to do, okay? Let's get these started in here. 10mm. Okay. Those are all definitely nice and tight lines are secured. Perfect. We'll get our nut on here. We'll find out what our torque's going to be. We'll move along.
All right, so I'm going to use my 32. I'm just going to snug this axle nut down. We're not going to go too tight, because I want to torque it to 135 foot pounds. I'm going to continue with my 32mm socket. There it is. I'm just going to hit one more time. Cool.
Now, you'll notice the top of the axle right here has a little notch out. All right? That's so we can peen this axle nut down. You want to use something like a punch, or whatever you happen to have, and peen this down so it'll lock it in. That's just going to prevent it from backing off somehow down the line. Just kind of peen it down. There we are. Some people might be tempted to use an air gun on that, and blast it on nice and tight, and maybe even hammer on it. What's going to happen at that point is you're going to damage your wheel bearing back there. If you did happen to use the air gun for some reason and you just bottomed it out, just go very gentle, bottom it out, and then make sure you torque it to 135 foot pounds.
Now, I'm going to get the wheel back up on here, just like that. I've got my 19mm lug nuts with my socket. Just get them on. All right, so now I'm just going to bottom these out in a star pattern. Okay,?I'm not going to go very tight because it's only 80 foot founds.
Now, I want to get the wheels so it's just barely touching the ground and can't spin like that and then I'm going to talk them down in a star pattern. I'm just going to tighten these down with my 19mm socket. I'm going to go into star pattern, so I'm going to start here. I'm going to make a nice pretty star. If I felt like it, I can go around one more time. It's really your prerogative what you want to do. I like to go around twice. Some people will say, "Don't worry about it." I'll just go around. Nice and snug. There we go. Great job.
Thanks for watching. If you want the parts to do it yourself, check out 1AAuto.com, the place for DIY auto repair.
