Replaces
Part Details
Install Tip: When replacing steering components, have a professional alignment performed afterwards. This ensures proper tracking and even tire wear.
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Item Condition:
New
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WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead and Lead Compounds, which are 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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Hi, I'm Mike from 1AAuto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years! We're dedicated to delivering quality auto parts, expert customer service, and fast and free shipping, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. So visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to be working with our 2006 Chrysler 300. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your vehicle's front lower control arm. This is the one in the front of your spindle with the ball joint installed in the actual arm, and not the one that connects to the spindle and the strut.
If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you need this part for your car, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com.
Here are the items you'll need for this repair: full metric socket set, ratchet, socket extensions, 21mm wrench, 22mm wrench, breaker bar, torque wrench, 6mm Allen key, hammer, safety goggles, gloves, rust penetrant, jack and jack stands
Using a 21mm socket and a breaker bar, loosen all of your lug nuts about one turn. Raise and support your vehicle. We're using a lift to make it easier to show you what's going on, but this job can easily be done at home with a jack and jack stand. Remove your lug nuts the rest of the way by hand. Remove your wheel and tire.
After removing your wheel and tire, locate the bolt for the forward lower control arm on the sub-frame to remove this. We use an 18mm socket breaker bar, as well as an open ended 21mm wrench on the nut at the back. Make sure that's on there good and tight, because you have much fewer points of contact with a wrench. You don't want to risk stripping it. Once you get it loose, you should be able to switch over to a socket and ratchet. Finish removing the nut and bolt by hand. Be sure not to lose these large washers that are on either side of the sub-frame.
We'll place those somewhere safe while we finish removing our forward lower control arm. Remove the 22mm nut on the bottom of your ball joint with a socket and a breaker bar. Now, what we're going to do here is loosen that nut so it's flush with the end of our bolt.
Now, we'll hit the end of the stud and the nut with a hammer until it releases from the spindle. Be careful not to damage the backing plate in the process. Be sure to use safety goggles during this step. Using the 6mm Allen key to hold the stud on the ball joints steady, remove the nut. This step should only be necessary if in hitting the nut you get it wedged onto the stud, so be sure to check the condition of the threads once you finish removing the nut. You may have to swing the spindle away some in order to get that ball joint out. You may need to use a pry bar to help work the control arm out of the sub-frame if it's really wedged in there like ours is. Remove the control arm from the vehicle.
Here we have our old control arm, which we removed from our vehicle, and our new part from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, this new part is a complete assembly, which comes with a nice new boot. You can see how beat up this old one is. Has a new nut for the end of our ball joint. You can see, this is actually a really good example of some reasons you might replace this arm.
Here we can see how bad the ball joint on the end is, while our new one has no up and down play in it. You can see that our bushing is tearing through pretty bad over here. Now, there is evidence that this vehicle was lowered substantially, meaning that the suspension took much more abuse than it would at its factory ride height, so this new part from 1AAuto is going to get our vehicle riding back the way it should, like it did when it was new without the clunks and bangs and the poor feel of suspension and handling from this torn bushing and bad ball joint. It's going to go in direct fit, just like our original equipment, and fix this up right.
Reinstall the lower control arm. We'll have to start on the spindle end. Turning the wheel could help give us a little bit of the extra clearance we're going to need. Remember, without both lower control arms, you are able to move the hub a little bit. We'll line up the rear and reinstall our bolt hand-tight to start. The bolt will go through from the front. Now, ours was being pretty difficult going in, so I ended up using the 18mm socket and ratchet to help spin it into place. Make sure that there's no substantial weight on the control arm when doing this. Otherwise, you risk damaging your threads.
Now, we'll support the nut with our 21mm wrench. We're just going to get this down close, but not tight until the weight of our suspension is on the vehicle. Otherwise, we risk pre-loading the bushing and cause premature wear to our new part. Now set the ball joint end into its hole in the control arm. You may have to move the stud in the ball socket or turn the spindle one way or the other or pull it in and out to line everything properly. Start your new nut on the end of the threads.
Now, you'll notice I'm pushing down on the ball joint to set the taper into the spindle. This should help prevent the stud from rotating. If not, we'll have to use that 6mm Allen key to hold the stud in place while we tighten the nut with a 22mm open-ended wrench. Torque the ball joint to 50 foot-pounds and add 90 degrees to it.
Now, we're going to use a screw jack, but you can easily do this by reinstalling your wheel and tire and just letting your vehicle off the jack, or you can use a jack to push up on this lower control arm. Now we're going to put the weight of the vehicle back on to the suspension by lifting up on it, just until it comes off of your jack stands or in our case the lift. We'll torque our lower control arm bolt at the cradle to 130 foot-pounds. Remove your jack or a screw jack.
If you didn't use the weight of the vehicle on the tires in order to reinstall it, we'll reinstall your wheel and tire now. Get your 21 mm lug nuts as tight as you can by hand. Lower the partial weight of your vehicle back onto the tires. Torque your lug nuts to 110 foot pounds in a cross pattern.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
Tools used
Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years. We're dedicated to delivering quality auto parts, expert customer service, fast and free shipping, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. Visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to be working with our 2006 Chrysler 300. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your vehicle's upper control arm in your front suspension. Now this part is an assembly, so it comes with new bushings and a new ball joint all ready to go. If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you want this part for your car, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.
Using a 21mm socket and a breaker bar, loosen all of your lug nuts about one turn. Raise and support your vehicle. We're using a lift to make it easier to show you what's going on, but this job can easily be done at home with a jack and jack stands. Remove your lug nuts the rest of the way by hand. Remove your wheel and tire.
Remove the nut on the bottom of your ball joint with a 19mm socket and ratchet. Using a bungee cord or a mechanic's wire, we're going to secure our control arm. Now this should be okay, but you want to be careful when it releases to make sure that it doesn't flop over too far and tear something like your ABS sensor or your brake hose.
Now if you were to just replace this upper control arm, you could use a pickle fork or a ball joint fork and separate it by tapping that in between. However, that's prone to damaging the boots. If you're going to remove this to service the spindle, the strut, or something like that, you'll want to keep this intact. To do that, we'll use a hammer and tap on the front or side of the spindle right where the ball joint taper goes through to release it. Once you've tapped it free, you'll see why we installed that bungee cord.
Remove the 18mm nut on the outside of the strut tower here, and its twin over on the backside down here. You can't see it very well but you can reach it with an 18mm wrench, so we'll remove both of those. Remove the nut and move onto the back side. Be very careful of any wiring you find here. Our bolt was actually pretty rusty and I was having a tough time getting it off with a wrench. Fortunately, an 18mm socket and this flexible handle ratchet was able to get in there and do the trick. Remove the nut.
Now we did our job on the passenger side but you'll follow the same steps for the driver side with this small exception of relocating your coolant reservoir. Now this only takes a moment so we'll show you how to do it. You push this thumb tab over here so you can lift up and release the power steering reservoir. Just hang that off to the side. Then using a 10mm socket, ratchet, and extension, we'll remove these two 10mm bolts. Now you simply lift up and you can move the reservoir out of the way to access your 18mm nut.
Now to access the rear bolt on the driver side you have this cool little access panel for your brake fluid reservoir, which may allow you a little more room to get at this nut down here.
Remove the two captured bolts securing the control arm in. All you got to do is grab the tab, wiggle them out. You got to lay them down flat to get them behind the strut like that. Do the same thing on the rear. Remove the control arm from the vehicle.
Here we have our old upper control arm that we removed from our vehicle and our new part from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, these parts are mirror images of each other, the reason for that being this is the passenger control arm that we removed and this is the driver side upper control arm that I ordered for the vehicle. I made a mistake here. It's very important that you check your parts before beginning a job for this exact reason here. Everybody makes mistakes. I ordered the wrong thing and started on the wrong side of the car, and had we been doing this in the driveway, we would have been in some trouble right now with a job we couldn't finish and a car we probably drive every day.
However, if you ordered the correct part, you'll see that they have the same ball joint. Our new one even comes with this nice nylon thread-locked nut on it and two brand new bushings. The shape of this control arm is a mirror image of this because, again, it's the opposite side. You can see that the shape does follow the same contours, so the passenger side would be identical to this just as the drivers on our vehicle would be identical to this part. If your bushings go bad, it can cause a little bit of a vibration or a thud, maybe some creaking noises when you go over bumps. As can a bad ball joint, these can cause alignment and tire issues as well as handling and steering issues that you'll notice when driving the vehicle. If you have a bad upper control arm, be it the arm itself being rusted or damaged, bad bushings, or a bad ball joint, this complete replacement assembly from 1AAuto.com is going to go in direct fit just like our original equipment, so long as you ordered the correct side, and fix you up right.
Install your control arm. Make sure you lay the tab down flat on the bolt so you can line it up with the hole. You may have to wiggle them around there. These can be a little tough to see how you're lining them up. You just got to get that bolt started and work them around until it goes all the way through. There you go. Then we'll follow the same steps for the bolt in the rear.
Now there was nothing wrong with our old control arm, which is why we're reinstalling it. It's also why it's a good thing that we removed it by tapping the knuckle as opposed to using it with a pickle fork because we would have damaged the boot and rendered it useless. Slide the ball joint back into the spindle and start your 19mm nut. Torque the ball joint nut to 35 foot-pounds. Now once it's torqued, we'll want to add a 90-degree turn to it. You can use a torque angle finder if you have one, or you can just eyeball it like we've done there.
Remove your bungee cord and reinstall your wheel and tire. Lower the partial weight of your vehicle back onto the tires. Reinstall both of your 18mm nuts onto the studs. The reason we're going to tighten these down now is because with the weight of the vehicle on the tires, tightening these bushings down will mean that they're tightened nice and straight at ride height, which will prevent them from getting preload or twisted with the vehicle at ride height, which would cause premature wear of our bushings, meaning we'll have to do the job again sooner.
Now I'm just going to get these down nice and tight by hand, and we should be fine. If you want to torque them, the spec is 55 foot pounds, but you're going to have to remove a lot of stuff to get a torque wrench in there. Maybe you could use a crow's foot for it. We'll just get them down nice and tight with our hand tools and everything should be just fine. We'll use whatever tool you used to loosen the nut to tighten it back up. We used an 18mm socket with a flexible handle ratchet. You may have used a short wrench or a ratcheting wrench. Whatever you used to get access in there is exactly what we'll use to tighten it.
If you removed your driver side upper control arm, you'll have to lay your reservoir back into place and reinstall the two 10mm bolts. Tighten them down with your socket, ratchet, and extension. Slide the power steering reservoir back in and push it down until it clicks. Torque your lug nuts to 110 foot pounds in a cross pattern.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
