Replaces
Part Details
Our control arms are designed to be direct replacements for the original factory parts. They are 100% brand new and require no modifications for installation. No special tools are required because all of the bushings come pre-installed.
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.
Item Condition:
New
Attention California Customers:
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.
FREE Shipping is standard on orders shipped to the lower 48 States (Contiguous United States). Standard shipping charges apply to Hawaii and Alaska.
Shipping is not available to a P.O. Box, APO/FPO/DPO addresses, US Territories, or Canada for this item.
Expedited is available on checkout to the United States, excluding Alaska, Hawaii.
Final shipping costs are available at checkout.
Created on:
Tools used
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. We've created thousands of videos to help you install our parts with confidence. That saves you time and money, 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 Ford Explorer. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your vehicle's lower control arm. Our new part comes with a ball joint in it.
If you like video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you need this part for your truck, 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, metric wrench set, ratchet, breaker bar, pry bar, hammer, rust penetrant, safety glasses, gloves, jack, jack stands
Using a 19mm socket and a breaker bar, loosen the lug nuts on your tire. Raise and support your vehicle. We're doing this on a lift to make it easier to show you what's going on, but this job can be done at home on a jack and jack stands. Finish removing your lug nuts. You should be able to do this by hand at this point. You can use a ratchet if you need to. You can then remove your wheel and tire.
It may be a good idea to apply some penetrating oil to whatever parts you're going to be working with. With a 16mm, put a 17mm wrench on the nut on the topside of your sway bar link and brace it against the frame of the vehicle. You can then use a 16mm socket and ratchet on the bottom to loosen it. The sway bar link on these vehicles is essentially a series of bushings and washers with a sleeve all held together by one long bolt, as opposed to being a one-piece unit like some other vehicles. You can see ours is pretty rough here, because there's usually not this much slack. That's actually what your bushing is supposed to look like on all four pieces, one on each side. You can see the old ones are worn down or cut there. It looks like they've actually fallen off over time. Once the nut's out, you can try to remove the bolt from the center of the sway bar link. This can be pretty difficult, so if it doesn't come out by hand, don't be afraid to get on there and give it a good hit with a hammer. The sway bar link will disassemble just like that when you pull it out, so just make sure you have all the old bushing material and all the old washers off of it.
Using a 24mm socket and ratchet, remove the bolt and the lower portion of the strut. This has a wing nut on it inside of the control arm that's going to rotate and jam up against the bottom, so you don't need to put a wrench on it. Just be ready to catch that when it does come out. The 24mm socket will loosen and remove the lower ball joint nut. Strike the side of the steering knuckle with a large hammer. Be sure to use this proper safety equipment. It should pop the ball joint free from the knuckle.
With a 24mm socket and ratchet, remove the 24mm nut on the rear of the lower control arm. This bolt is fixed in to the subframe. We'll loosen the nut until it's flush with the end of the bolt. Move the nut and slide that rear bolt out of your control arm. Using a 30mm axle socket and a breaker bar, loosen the nut on the front of the lower control arm. Once you get it moving, you'll probably need to brace the bolt side. That's going to be a 24mm wrench. Leave the nut flush with the end of the bolt so you can help tap it loose. Then you should be able to remove it by hand and pry your control arm down. Now at this point, as long as you have the lower ball joint released from the knuckle, you should be able to sneak everything out and remove your lower control arm from the vehicle.
Install the lower ball joint of your new lower control arm into the knuckle. You'll need to find the right angle to sneak this in at. Then just for safety, we'll start the new nut. Set the strut into the lower control arm and then line up the backs. Set the bolts into place and start the nuts. Now you could do this yourself with a pry bar, but to make things easier to line up, I'm going to have a helper push down on the spindle while we install the strut bolt. You may be able to use a pry bar to help line up that bottom bolt. You're going to want to send just the tip of the bolt through and install that flag nut on the backside by lining it up and trying to thread that strut bolt into it. Once you've got everything started, you can bring all your bolts down close before we preload the suspension and torque everything into place.
It's a 24mm socket and ratchet for the strut bolt. Again, we're just going to get that close for now. It's also a 24 on the backside of the rear control arm bolt. We'll then use the 24mm wrench on the bolt head and the 30mm socket and ratchet, this is usually an axle nut socket, on the backside of the front bolt. Torque the lower ball joint nut to 111 foot-pounds. Using a screw jack or a floor jack, put the weight of the vehicle onto it so the suspension is at ride height. This means when we torque down our bushings, everything will be in place with no preload. The strut bolt gets torqued to 248 foot pounds. We did need to rent a larger torque wrench to get these sizes, but it is still a 1/2" drive and still works with the sockets we already had. Using a 24mm wrench to hold the bolt and a 30mm socket and torque wrench, torque this to 296 foot-pounds. The nut on the rear control arm is also 24. That gets torqued to 148 foot-pounds.
Now you sort of need to build the sway bar link into the truck, so we'll start with a washer and then a bushing. We'll go up through the control arm, install a bushing with the tapered end down, followed by another washer, the sleeve, a washer with the cup end facing up, and a bushing with the tapered end facing up. We'll go through the sway bar, install another bushing, then install the washer and the nut and tighten your new hardware down. You'll want a 17mm wrench on the nut and a 16mm socket and ratchet on the bolt end. Just tighten that up until it compresses the bushings so you know that everything's nice and tight and there's no slop in there to make any noise when you go over bumps. Once that's down tight, you can lower the weight off of the screw jack or floor jack.
Reinstall the wheel and tire onto your hub. It's easiest to put a lug nut inside of the 19mm socket to start it onto the studs. Get all five of these down as tight as you can by hand, and then we'll torque the wheel once there's some weight on it. Lower the vehicle back down and put partial weight onto the wheel and tire. This means that you may have your jack or lift under the vehicle. Get the tire to touch and let the vehicle come down some without allowing it completely off of the lift or jack. Torque your lug nuts to 100 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 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. We've created thousands of videos to help you install our parts with confidence. That saves you time and money, so visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the front upper control arm. This is a 2006 Ford Explorer. It’s basically the same for 2006 to 2010. We show you on the passenger side, but the driver's side is the same procedure.
Please click Subscribe to see all our other videos for Explorer, as well as other Fords and other makes and models. To get the part in this video, click the link down in the description and go to 1AAuto.com for thousands of parts for all your needs.
Use your lug wrench or a 19mm socket with a big ratchet or breaker bar, and loosen your lug nuts while the vehicle is on the ground. We’re using a lift, but a jack and jack stands can be used as well. Remove the lug nuts the rest of the way, and then remove your wheel and tire.
With the vehicle supported on jack stands, or on the lift, you want to just put a floor jack underneath and raise up the suspension just to take a little bit of the load off. You need an 18mm and you need a deeper socket to clear the whole stud. Use a nice big breaker bar for some extra leverage and pull. Mine's coming apart pretty easy. Once it gets easy, just go with a wrench, and you want to make sure that this stud isn't spinning. Usually it's not. Leave the nut in place here and use a ball joint fork and a large hammer to separate the ball joint from the steering knuckle.
We're going to spray the ends of the bolts that are at the top of the control arm with rust penetrant. These two bolts are 18mm. The nuts should have a tab that locks into the control arm, so you don't have to hold the nut side. Nice big breaker bar, 18 mm socket on the front one fits in nicely. You can loosen it up. On this side, we'll use a 3/8 because it's just a little smaller. Let’s get in there. The only problem is, it doesn't give us as much leverage. You can see the nut spinning around right now, but in a moment it's going to get caught on the control arm and it'll come apart. If need be, you can use a piece of pipe, put over your ratchet. Just be careful not to overload the ratchet, and apply pressure gently for more leverage. Remove the bolts, just make sure that the nuts don't fall down too far, like that.
Then the bottom of this is an 8mm. The wrench fits on, so if you need to you can hold it. Remove the nut, and once it gets to a certain point, you may have to lock onto the stud with some slip-jaw pliers. Hold it there to remove it the rest of the way. Take the nut out, and lift this up and out. Have a bungee cord ready, put it around to hold the knuckle in place, and then you can pull your broken control arm out.
On the left, you can see the original part out of our 2006 Ford Explorer. On the right, the new part from 1AAuto.com. It's going to install and function just the same as the original. The only differences are very minor and cosmetic. The beauty of these is that they come with the ball joint, so either if your ball joint is bad or your bushings are worn out, installation of a new control arm from 1A Auto is going to fix your problem.
New control arm from 1A Auto, I'm just going to take the new locking nut off. I have one of our bolts ready. Slide it into place, hold the end and through just for now to hold it in place. Same thing down here. Make sure you get your bolts in first. Then our caged nuts in place. Start the bolts on. With those in place, carefully take off your bungee, or whatever's holding the spindle. Just put that down in for now and start the nut. Now, we're going to tighten up for the bolts. We'll tighten them up enough so that the control arm can still move. Once you get it to a certain point, you can push it in and you can see where your washer use to be, so we'll just move right to there and we'll tighten up preliminarily.
This will give you a preliminary alignment, and we do suggest that you get your vehicle realigned after you complete the repair. Once you've done the rear, do the same thing for the front. Before we put the knuckle together, or torque anything, we're going to raise the suspension up to its ride position. So, there should be no weight on your jack stand, or a little bit of space between your jack stand and your frame, and then that usually holds the stud pretty well here. We'll tighten this up.
Now we'll torque our two bolts to 111 foot-pounds. Do a final check and make sure they're lined up where they were originally if it's for a preliminary alignment. Again, torque them to 111 foot-pounds. Tighten this nut to 41 foot-pounds. After everything's tightened up, let your jack down. Again, we do recommend a front wheel alignment after this repair.
Reinstall your wheel and tire. Start all your lug nuts by hand first; make sure they don't cross-thread. Use your lug wrench, socket and ratchet, or whatever and tighten them up preliminarily. Lower the vehicle onto the ground. Tighten your lug nuts to 100 foot pounds using a star pattern to tighten them.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
