1998 Ford Expedition 4 Wheel Drive with 2.48 in. Bolt Pattern Idler Arm Front 8 Piece Steering & Suspension Kit TRQ PSA59072

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.

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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.

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