2012 Dodge Challenger Front Driver Side Upper Control Arm with Ball Joint TRQ PSA83747

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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.

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