2001 Ford Expedition 4 Wheel Drive with 2.48 in. Bolt Pattern Idler Arm without Air Suspension Front 14 Piece Steering & Suspension Kit TRQ PSA58969

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts, installed correctly that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

This video is part one of a two-part series, replacing the ball joint in this '97 Expedition. In this video, we basically detail removing the old ball joint. This is the same for all the Expeditions, F150s, Explorers, a whole bunch of the Ford trucks and SUVs from this era.

Here's a list of the tools that we use on the Expedition. If you're doing a vehicle different from the Expedition, some of these sizes may differ. You will need heavy-duty tools. You're not going to want to try this with the 20-piece set Uncle Joe gave you for Christmas. This is heavy work. You'll need jack and jack stands, metric sockets 13-27 mm, standard sockets 1/2 inch to 7/8, you'll need a 35 mm socket, a 12 point 13 mm socket, ratchets extensions and a breaker bar or pipe because you will need to get some leverage on some of those bigger bolts and things, pliers, hammer, a heavy punch, ball joint removal tool, ball joint press, large flat blade screwdriver, and a paint marker or a old can of spray paint. The ball joint removal tool I'd recommend if you're going to be doing a lot of your own work. It's a pretty affordable tool to go out and get. Ball joint press might be something that you want to borrow.

Obviously, you're going to start by removing your cap. If you don't have the benefit of air tools, what you'll want to do is start with your wheel on the ground. With your wheel on the ground, there are probably three things you're going to want to do. Loosen your lug nuts. Then there's a 35 mm bolt in the center that holds the axle into the hub you're going to want to take the cotter pin and the cover off of that and loosen that 35 mm bolt. Also, go underneath and there are seven 13 mm 12 point bolts that hold your axle to your front drive. You'll want to just loosen those seven bolts. Much easier to loosen all these bolts with your tire on the ground held in place if you don't have all the tools that I have access to. You're going to want to loosen up your torsion bar. Your torsion bar is actually your spring. This is what supports the vehicle. I'm just going to take a little silver spray paint ... That way, when I back that bolt out, I'll know where it originally was.

Using an 18 mm socket and a ratchet, I'm going to loosen the torsion bar tension nut, or bolt, and you can basically pull it all the way out and then just turn it back in a few turns. You just want to loosen it up and take as much tension off the torsion bar as you can. You can see as I'm done, you can see where there's no paint on the threads, that that is how far you would want to retighten it. Now we're going to undo our tie rod end here. I'm just going to speed it up here. The cotter pin's very rusty, so first so first I break it with the pliers. Then I use a hammer and punch and just kind of keep working and breaking small pieces off until I can drive it through and out of the tie rod end. Now I'm pounding a 21 mm socket onto that nut because it was quite rusty. I just want to make sure I get a good socket that gets a good grip on it.

I've got a bar on here. Put a piece of pipe on it for some more leverage. Hopefully it comes apart. Just fast forward here as I switch over to a ratchet and remove the nut the rest of the way. Here I'm going to put a tie rod, it's a tie rod and ball joint tool, but obviously I'm using it to do a tie rod right now. By using this tool, I can assure that I can just reassemble my tie rod. I won't damage the tie rod by removing it this way. Next, I'm going to remove the stabilizer link, so I'm going to spray the top of it with some penetrating oil and let it sit for awhile. These stabilizer links are sometimes difficult to get apart. You can use hand tools. They will come apart. I just chose to use a impact wrench just to make it easier. I have a 9/16 socket on the bottom and a 14 mm socket on the top.

Use a hammer and pound down on that bolt. Then use a punch, see if you can it to go down through the sleeve. I end up actually having to use vice-grips and a wrench. Obviously, you also want to remove the other side so you can move your stabilizer bar around easily. What I'm going to do here, put set of vice-grips onto this shaft, tighter here. Now we're going to remove the half shaft of the CV axle. As I said in the beginning of the video, these are the bolts that if you don't have all the tools that I have, it might be easier to just loosen them while the vehicle's on the ground. You can see I use a big, large crowbar to hold the hub in place while I'm loosening those bolts.

You can see I spin it, loosen one of the bolts, spin it some more, loosen another bolt. If you were actually doing this with your vehicle on the ground, you'd have to probably loosen one or two of the bolts, then roll your car a little bit, put it in park, put the emergency brake on, loosen a couple more, and keep repeating that process.
Once it's unbolted, pull it down and off. I use a pair of pliers and either break off the ends or just straighten out the cotter pin and pull it out. Okay, 35 mm ... As I said in the beginning, if you don't have impact tools and this is easier with the tire on and on the ground, your other option would be to have a helper hold the brakes while you remove it.

What I do is give it one tap and just watch it, see if it moves. Actually, it moves pretty freely. You can pull your stabilizer bar up and out of the way. Pull your axle down towards the front. Then push it, lift it up, push it out. I've got the vehicle support under the frame. Then I've got my jack right under the control arm. You can see there is the bolt for the ball joint, and then there's the jack. I have a piece of the wood on there so I can easily access that ball joint bolt, as well as get a puller on there. Now I can jack it up. You can see, without that torsion bar tightened, the suspension travels here very easily.

Now I'm going to use pliers to break off and remove the cotter pin from the lower bolt. It ends up being kind of a rusty mess, so I actually use a hammer and punch and pretty much just break it away as much as possible so I can get that bolt off. Now a 27 mm socket put it on there, use a little hammer, make sure it goes all the way on. Got a breaker bar on there, actually you're going to take piece of pipe, put it on, give me some extra leverage. It's coming loose. Just one note here: It will help if you take your tie rod and put it back into the steering knuckle and just put the bolt on. That tie rod will hold things in place while you loosen that ball joint nut.

Just speed it up as I change over to my ratchet and take that bolt most of the way off. While my bolt's still on there, take my ball joint removal tool- This just, doing it this way, allows you to break it free without things falling down. Finish removing this bolt. Get your control arm on up. Pull the steering knuckle down and off.
There's a snap ring that holds the ball joint in place. You can use snap ring pliers. Mine was pretty rusty so I used a screwdriver and a hammer to just kind of pry it off and pop it off.

Now you're going to take a ball joint pulling tool, put the collar up on there. With this particular press use a 7/8 socket, put one on top there, and just tighten down the press. Traded my ratchet handle for my breaker bar. I'm going to speed it up here. What I did there was I created a whole lot of pressure by tightening it down. Then I used a hammer, gave it a good whack that kind of broke it free, and then the press just works it the rest of the way out. There's my old ball joint out.
Good a place as any to end it. Check out part two for the reassembly.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Please feel free to call us toll-free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the Internet and in person.

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.

So, when we're going to start this project, we're going to go ahead and loosen the lug nuts on the wheel. We're going to use a breaker bar with a 19 mm socket. Next, we're going to go ahead and raise and support your vehicle. You can use a jack and jack stands. In this case, here, we're using a lift to make it a little bit easier. We just go ahead and remove the lug nuts here, just by using that socket, because we already loosened those. With the lug nuts removed, we can now go ahead and remove the wheel and tire.

Right about here, we have your sway bar or anti-sway bar end link, here. Here's your sway bar. In most cases, here, you'll find these sway bar end links broken. What we're going to do is we're going to show you how to go ahead and remove this and do an installation for you. This component, here, can actually be removed and replaced with the tire still on the vehicle. We just happened to have the vehicle up in the air with the tire off so it just made it a little bit easier. This is something you can do with the tire still on there.

All right, so we're going to use a 14 mm on the head of the bolt down below, and we're going to use a 14 mm on the top. It may vary on your application. I'm going to go ahead and remove this nut here. Now, this does come off in stages. You have your main washer. You have your rubber of poly bushing. Then, obviously, you have the sway bar link here, or the sway bar itself, anti-sway bar. I'm going to try and just tap this down. This bolt will slide out through the bottom. What we don't want to lose is all these components in the middle here. We're going to show you what those do. Before we pull this out, we're going to go ahead and start pulling apart the internal pieces here.

Here is your complete anti-sway bar end link. You can actually see it just starts off with just a basic bolt. Then you have your metal collar here. You want to make sure that that slides on so that the dish part is facing upward. Then you're going to take your component here. Your bushing could be a poly or rubber bushing. Slide that down. Now, this is going to go up inside the control arm. What you want to do is sleeve the components together. What's going to happen next is your next bushing is going to go on, followed by your next dish. Now this is going to go the opposite way, so it's going to compress and squeeze against its matching component. This here is simply just a sleeve. It's not threaded. Slips right down. Your next component is that there. Slide this on, and once again we're going to sleeve the other component, which is your sway bar, your anti-sway bar. That'll slip on followed by that, and followed by the nut. That there is your complete unit. Our vehicle doesn't actually need replacement, but this is just your R & R process.

Here's the reinstallation. Going to slide this up through the bottom, and go ahead and slide your bushing down, followed by that spacer and that washer. We're going to now go ahead and put the sleeve on. It's going to be the next bushing. I'm sorry, it's actually your spacer, here, first, then the bushing. Now, you have the slide this up underneath like so. You want to push that up, push that bolt up through the middle. Now, you can see the base bolt is in.

You have your bushing, collar, sleeve, collar, bushing. The bushing and the collar right there. The last component is the nut. We're going to go ahead and get the threaded on. We're going to go ahead and tighten this up with a 14 mm. As you're tightening this here, you may be wondering, "How tight do I tighten this here?" Well, basically you want to get it so that the rubber bushing expands out to roughly the diameter of the metal washers there.

I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the tire. I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the lug nuts, here. You want to get a few threads caught on all of these, here. These lug nuts are a 19 mm. We're just going to snug these, bottom it out, bottom the wheel out to the rotor. We're going to lower the vehicle down onto its own weight, and then do a final torque. With the vehicle on the ground, we're going to do its final torque of the wheel, which is between 83 and 112 foot pounds. We're going to do it in a star pattern. I'll just double check the first one. She's all set.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com. Your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Thanks for tuning in, this is Part Two of a two part series. We're going to go through reinstalling your lower ball joint on this '97 Expedition. This procedure is similar for a whole bunch of different Ford trucks and SUVs. Here's a list of tools that we used on this Expedition. If you have a different vehicle some of the sizes may differ and one thing that is not on here, you will want a grease gun to grease up the ball joint after you install it.

We've got our control arm here. We're just going to put it right on there like that. Our ball joint, our collar and then that's going to go up and in. We put our press on there. I'm going to speed it up here so we use the press to push the ball joint up and in and you do this in two steps. This first step is just going to get the top of the ball joint flush with the top of the control arm. We're going to take this boot off. Now with this ramp here on top of it. I'll fast forward here again as we use that press to push the ball joint the rest of the way up into the control arm until it's nice and tight, the bottom is nice and tight against the bottom of the control arm and then put your protective boot back on. Now you want to lock it in place with a snap ring. You can get this on without snap ring pliers, but they certainly are a help. Just get this set up.

What I'm going to do is I'm just going to thread the nut on a little bit and then use a hammer to kind of knock the ball joint outward, that helps make it easier to get the other and just keep that protective boot up on there. That's just going to allow your knuckle down on there, your knuckle up, take your jack out of the way. Lift it up on the knuckle and bolt. Okay, I'm going to speed through putting the half shaft back in. One thing I did forget to do, I do a little bit later, is now is the best time to put the grease fitting on top of the ball joint, before you put that axel in there, but put the axel in place to get it into the hub and then get it lined up on the axel and start a couple of those 13 mm bolts. Once you get all the bolts in you want to torque them to 60 foot pounds and what I do is I use a black marker.

I mark the head of them after I torque them. Then you want to kind of go to the opposite side, torque the next bolt, mark it and just keep going until they're all torqued. I'm just putting the tie rod back on. Just put the nut on there and keep it in place. Now we want to tighten the ball joint nut to 98 foot pounds and that's for this '97 Expedition. It could be different for your vehicle. Okay, I put our cotter pin through, bend it down and around. I'm going to fast forward through putting the grease fitting on top. Like I said earlier a little bit easier to do this step before you put the axel in. Then continue to fast forward as a put a grease gun onto that fitting and fill the lower ball joint with grease. Okay, I'm going to tighten my tie rod nut to 60 foot pounds. Next the cotter pin through, bend it down. Here I'm going to install this sway bar link. I've already put a new link on the other side, then just started the nut on it. Bushing, the bushings always go towards the metal.

Okay, so I've got a bushing on the bottom going up to the mount control arm and a bushing above that. Then my shaft goes on there and then the washer, then the bushing pushing down and in. Make sure the bushing is centered in the stabilizer bar unit. Now bushing and washer, then my nut. Now you'll want to use your jack to put some pressure on the suspension and then tighten up the stabilizer to 15 to 17 foot pounds. Then we'll put on our center hub nut. We're just going to tighten that preliminarily. We're not going to torque it until the wheel's back on. Now you can let your suspension back down and you want to re-tighten your torsion bar and since we marked it we can tighten it right back up to where it was before. You can put your tire back on and start each lug nut one by one. Make sure you don't cross thread them. Tighten them down preliminarily. Torque the lug nuts to a hundred foot pounds using a star pattern. Okay, now using a 35 mm socket torque your lug nut to 220 foot pounds. Put the retainer back on and then the cotter pin, then your wheel cap. We recommend you have your alignment checked and adjusted if necessary.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Please feel free to call us toll free 888-844-3393. We're the company that's with you on the Internet and in person.

To remove the idler arm from the steering, raise and support your vehicle. Go underneath here to the castle nut and start by removing the cotter pin with some side-cutting pliers. The goal is to not cut it, but just get a hold of them and bend it until it's kind of straight. Sometimes they break off. You can kind of grab the rounded end and try to pry against it like this. Just keep readjusting it. Just pry and there you go, pull it out.

Loosen the 21 millimeter castle nut. You can use a socket and a ratchet or a wrench. This one is pretty tight, so I've switched to a breaker bar. There it is. I will switch back to my ratchet now that it's broken free. Once this is loose, take it off by hand.

This one's actually really loose and it came right now. If this was stuck on the taper, because this is tapered and it jams into the steering control rod, you would take a idler arm puller tool, place it in here and you would turn this with your wrench and it would separate the idler arm from the steering control rod, but we got lucky on this one and it slid right off.

Remove the two 21 millimeter bolts that are holding the idler arm to the frame. Use my 21 millimeter box wrench, break these free. Now that these are broken free with my 21 millimeter box wrench, I'm going to use a 21 millimeter socket, ratchet, and extension. Just make it go a little quicker. Got one. Now we're going to hold the idler arm with one hand, take out the last bolt. And we can pull it from the frame.

Here's our old idler arm from our vehicle. Here's our new idler arm from 1AAuto.com. The dimensions between the bolt holes are the same. Their design is a little bit different but the dimensions from here to here match up.

Before you install it, you want to remove the brand new castle nut it comes with, take off the plastic cover that protects the boot during shipping. It also comes with a new cotter pin, a new grease fitting to go down here, and a new grease fitting to go down the side of this joint here. It should make the steering feel a lot tighter on your vehicle.

Install our new grease fittings, just by hand. Take a small 9/32 inch wrench on this one. A couple turns, just so it's tight, and stop. There’s one on this side. Then reinstall the idler arm to the frame. Start with my top bolt, then the lower bolt. Install that. Use my 21 millimeter ratchet and extension, finish installing it. Stop this as it gets tight, because I will come back and torque these afterwards.

Reinstall our steering linkage. Push it up there with a new castle nut. Use a 21 millimeter socket and ratchet. The torque spec on this is 56 to 84 foot-pounds, so I'm going to torque it 70. This way if you need to go more, you can, but by torquing it you should be able to seat it onto the taper. So if you turn it and the castle nut doesn't line up with the hole for the cotter pin, by giving yourself some more room on the torque number we can actually tighten this a little bit more. Just going to go maybe a quarter of a turn to get the hole to line up. Finds it nice. Grab it, bend it down and then the other one the other way. The torque for these two bolts is 126 to 169. We're going to do 140 foot-pounds. Get our torque wrench in here.

I'm going to grease these fittings. So just grease these until you start to see a bit of grease come out right here. You can actually see the boot fill up with grease. That looks nice and full, a little bit of grease coming out and then you can stop. Wipe up the excess grease, and your job is complete.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.

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.

So in order to start this project you want to go ahead and loosen the wheel and the lug nuts here. We're going to use a breaker bar with a 19 millimeter socket. So next we're going to go ahead and raise and support your vehicle. You can use a jack and jack stands. In this case here we're using a lift to make it a little bit easier. Just go ahead and remove the lug nuts here just by using that socket because we've already loosened those. With the lug nuts removed we can now go ahead and remove the wheel and tire.

So this right here is your outer tie rod end. We have the nut here to anchor this on. This is the castle nut. Normally you would have a cotter pin through here, but this did not have it in there. So it must have rotted or fallen out. So we're going to go ahead and remove this nut off of the outer tie rod end, and we're going to use a 13/16” wrench for this here.

So in order to remove this outer tie rod end, this actually fits into a tapered hole. What we can usually do in our driveway at home is, if you use a hammer and you strike the front here, it normally causes this to pop out. So now that we have this out, you can see that this is a tapered base, and this fits tightly into the front of the steering knuckle. So when you tighten up the castle nut, it sucks it down inside and keeps it nice and tight.

We're going to go ahead and replace the adjuster sleeve right here. We want to start by removing your outer tie rod end. Ideally, you want to count the amount of threads that this comes out on, so you have full rotation of this ball joint on your tie rod end.

Okay. We're going to use a 24 millimeter and we want to go ahead and basically unthread this off of the inner tie rod end. There we go. Now, because we're just replacing the adjuster sleeve, you can leave this jam nut right here, and when you take the new adjuster sleeve, just thread it right on up to that jam nut. There we go.

This here is the old part. This here is the new part from 1A Auto. If you notice, on the old part, we have the spot right here that has a flat section so you could put your wrench on there. Our part also has that. On the installation it is important to know that each side is a different diameter. The larger is the inner tie rod end port, and the smaller one is for the outer tie rod, so you can only put it on one way. Obviously if you have the smaller port, it just won't fit.

We're just going to go ahead and thread this on. When this threads on, you're going to notice that the wrench side is closer to the tie rod on the outer tie rod, but this here was closer to the inner. It doesn't matter. It's going to work the same exact way, it's just to give you an anchoring point for your wrench. Okay, you want to just crank that right up by hand up to that jam nut.

Now that we have the adjuster sleeve installed, because we don't actually have to replace this outer tie rod end, we can go ahead and get this installed now. In this component, we did count 31 full rotations. That means for the ball joint section facing down, a full rotation, that is one. We counted 31 of those there. In case you were installing a new outer tie rod end, you would have that count. I believe that was a 31. We'll just tighten up that jam nut by hand a little bit.

Then you're ready for your installation. Install your castle nut. You would tighten this up. Line up the castle nut with the hole in the outer tie rod end there. Use your cotter pin, feed it through, and then you're going to want to bend that over using a pair of pliers. Your adjuster sleeve may come with jam nuts. If your factory equipment is just fine, there's no need to replace them. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and tighten up these jam nuts.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the tire. I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the lug nuts here. You want to get a few threads caught on all of these here. These lug nuts are 19 millimeters. So we're just going to snug these, bottom it out. Bottom the wheel out to the rotor. We're going to lower the vehicle down onto its own weight, and then do a final torque. With the vehicle on the ground, we're going to do a final torque of the wheel which is between 83 and 112 foot pounds. We're going to do it in a star pattern. All right, just double check the first one. She's all set.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.