How to Replace Front Upper Control Arm 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1AAuto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser and I'm going to be replacing the upper control alarm. It's going to be a very easy job and I want to show you how to do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com thanks.

Okay, so here we go. We're going to remove the wheel, a 21 mm socket, six lug nuts. The reason why I left this on a few threads is so I can put down the rest of the lug nuts so I have empty hands. We'll remove our wheel, set this aside so it's safe. So now that we've got the wheel off we've got a clear view of our upper control arm right here. We're going to remove this 10 mm head bolt. This just holds your ABS wire bracket. Once this is out of the way, we'll be clear to continue. So I'm just going to, you didn't see that, you should use a hammer.

Grab our bracket, this wobbles around. It's nice and free. This clip right here goes straight through the ball joint on this side, but this side right here has a little hooky-do that goes around the backside. So what you want to do is grab a small screwdriver or pick, whatever you've got, drag it out, see if I can get it now, and along the bottom side of the ball joint, just like that. Grab your cutters, don't cut it, but just kind of tug it out. That's what it looks like right there. Okay. You get the straight straight through, goes through the ball joint and you've got the hooky-do that grabs on.

We're going to remove this nut right here. The easiest way to do that would be if we didn't have the sway bar link in the way right here. If you wanted to, you could take this off and then just take out your sway bar link. It should be pretty easy. Once you do that, you'll be able to get to this very easy, or you can just use a wrench and a ratchet. You can use a ratchet and a socket. I've got my 19 mm socket, fits right on there. Wearing my safety glasses so I don't punch myself in the eye.

Give that a nice tug. I want to make sure I don't go down too far because it'll get to the point where I won't be able to get my ratchet out of there. So just make sure you pay special attention to how much space you have. Once it's loose, you can just grab it with your hand. Take it right off of there. Easy-peasy. This is a castle nut, it's got slots. You want to line the slots up with the holes in your ball joint. Let me grab my little hammer and I'm going to go ahead and give this a bonk, right on the knuckle right here. I want to be careful for the boot and I want to be careful for those threads. Super important that I don't damage the threads. I guess it doesn't really matter cause I'm replacing this anyway. Come to think of it, but if you weren't, then you want to be careful. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but basically I want a bonk right here.

I wanted to mention that you want to put your nut back on a few threads, just like that. This is so that when I break this free and this wants to come down, it can't come down and hurt me. Safety is the number one concern at 1AAuto. Now I'm just going to give this a couple bonks. I'm going to wait for it to break free. It separated right here. Still got plenty of slack on my ABS cable on my wire. Pull that up and here we are. Okay.

At this point, we want to make sure that this can't go very far because we don't want to pull our axle apart. That'll hold it enough for me. Yeah, so I'm not putting too much pressure on anything. Still nice and loose. I'm going to remove this right here and that's going to take the bracket off of the knuckle here and it's going to give us more slack on this ABS wire. We definitely want to make sure we don't put any tugs on the ABS wire. I'm removing this with a 12 mm. socket. That's what our bolt looks like. We'll set this aside.

Cool, so now this moves around, we've got plenty of slack on everything, I like it. So right behind here we've got a nut with a stud that comes out and then over here we've got a bolt end, okay. So I'm going to grab the wrench for this, 19. Now what we're going to need to do is turn this to the left counterclockwise to break it free, and get it off of there. Super tight, super-duper tight. I'm going to pop these pins real quick. I'm just going to see if I can find my tool. There we are, get that out of way, this out of the way. Very nice. We have a clear view of what's going on. I'm going to try to remove this right here. Once I removed this, I'm going to be able to hopefully move this out of the way and I'll be able to get a ratchet with a socket in there and it's gonna make my life a lot easier.

As you can tell, everything's pretty rusted here. So I'm just going to go ahead and spray everything with a little bit of penetrant spray. Let's go over here too, just because, okay. We're going to remove that. I've got my 12 mm socket. Just get it down on there. Just try to give like short vibrations essentially just to try to break it free just because I don't want to twist it. If I twist that it could break off into the frame and it's just going to cause me a headache. That's what that bolt looks like. We'll set this aside. Okay, so now this can move. Now I've got plenty of room to be able to get a bigger socket and a bigger ratchet on here and it should be a little bit easier for me. So I've got my ratchet, my 19 mm socket. This is so much easier. All it took was just a 12 mm. bolt and did a ... It really made my life easier.

So this is spinning all the way up here, so I'm going to hold that. If you wanted to use an air gun on this, you had access to it. That might be great for you. I'm just going to go ahead and do it this way since I'm almost all the way done. Remove that nut and the washer. We'll put them together so we can remember that they go together. They were happy that way been together a long time. Cool. I'm going to take this off of here. There we are.

Okay, now what should happen? You should be able to put this bolt straight up this way? Just feel around behind there. See if there's anything that feels like it's getting in your way. I'm holding the washer because obviously the washer is not going to want to go up with it. If you feel anything in your way up there, just slide it out of the way. No big deal. Easy-peasy. Good old Toyota, there we are. There's our bolt and our right front upper control arm. Easy-peasy.

Here we are friends, a quick product comparison for you. Right over here we have our original right front upper control arm out of our 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser, and over here we have our brand new quality 1AAuto part. As you can tell, these two parts are shaped the exact same. It's very important to make sure that you've got your U going in the same direction, right? The ball joints located over here and not over here. If for some reason yours is on this side, you've just got the wrong side, it's no big deal. Okay? You've got our mounting areas right here. This is where that through bolt went through. This is where it connects to the knuckle right here. The ball joint you take off this nut right here comes to the brand new nut, which is always great. Comes with a brand new boot as well. Of course, right? It's very important that it does. This has everything that we need to go ahead and complete this job, so I'm going to go ahead and install it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so we've got our long bolt here. All right, it will be nice to use something like this. A little bit of Copper never seize. I'm not going to do this yet, but I am going to do it once I start getting it up into the vehicle. If I do it now, of course, then I'm going to be handling it. That's going to be a pain in the butt. So Copper never seize it would be good. You can go right up inside the tube area. This tube comes down from here diagonal, and it comes out the other end.

Okay, that's going to make this bolt come out nice and easy in the future. If we end up having to take it out again for any reason. Okay. We'll take our control arm. We want to make sure that we have our ABS wire out of the way. It goes above the control arm. We'll just set this down for now. I'm going to bring the bolt up into the fender well. Now I'm going to start sliding it right through the control arm, through that tunnel area, and then through the other end of the control arm. So I'm going to get the washer down at this end, obviously.

I'm gonna go this way. Bring this up here. There we are, okay. Then my control arm. Getting everything lined up is fun. Just spray that on there and I'm going to continue putting my bolt through and it's just going to walk along with it. It's going to come out the other end there. Here we are, clean off the excess. We don't need all that on there. Cool. So now when we go to tighten up this control arm bolt, you want to make sure that the control arm isn't sitting straight down like this.

Essentially you want the control arm to be happily sitting, imagining that the ground force was on the vehicle or the, yeah, so essentially the wheels were on the ground. Your suspension is going to kind of hold this up approximately about here. Pretty much parallel to the ground. So that's about where you want to keep it when you're tightening this up. So, however you need to make it, so it's going to stay like that. You can go ahead and use something like a ah, this is pry bar is a little long, but pry bar, just stick it through like that. That'll hold it. You of course want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses for all this. Now I'm going to take my washer and my nut. They both go together. Put that on there.

If you want to use a little bit of thread locker, you can clean this down. Use thread locker. It's up to you. Your prerogative. For the purpose of this video, I'm not going to worry about it. Here we are, I'm going to hold this side with my 19, tighten that side up with my 19 socket. Okay, getting snug here. We're going to torque this down to 85 foot pounds with our 19 mm. Get it on there. Hold the wrench side. Hold that. There we are, just going to hit it one more time, perfect. Torqued 85 foot pounds with a 19 mm. Get this out of the way. Okay, so now what we're going to do, I'm going to put a little bit of Copper never seize here. Just in the bolt hole where we took that line off or the line bracket.

The line bracket has a little ear that's going to sit inside the rearward hole and then the forward holes for the bolt. Squiggle it around. Set that in there. We're going to tighten this up. Grab this. Just going to slide these through, just like that. This one, same thing over here, just not up in there. Perfect. Now we can move ahead to the next step. There bring this over. Here we are. So we know this is gonna go like this. Just grab our new nut. Okay, cool. We'll bottom this out put the nut on here and move along to the next step. We're going to go ahead and tighten up this control arm right here. Upper ball joint to the knuckle. Just going to take a peek.

Okay, now we'll torque it to 81 foot pounds. The hole in the ball joint stud doesn't line up with the slots and the upper ball joint nut. So now what we need to do is continue turning that clockwise until the next slot lines up with the hole. Continue with our ratchet. I'm just going to bring this, like I said, so the slot matches up with the hole and we're going to take our little clip, put it through, just like this and then bring it up and you should want to grab into one of those little slots. Now it's going nowhere. It's happy there. Perfect. We'll put it in this upper bolt. I'll just use a little bit of Copper never seize there it's your prerogative if you want to. We've got our 10 mm head bolt.

We're gonna line up this bracket. Try and get our bolt going straight here we are, just get our sway bar link in there. There we are. If you want to, you could use a little thread locker on this. It's up to you, and I tighten that down. 18 mm. There we are. Tight, tight, can move along to the next step right down here. That's a 12 mm. I'll grab my 12 mm socket. If you wanted to put a little Copper never seize into the knuckle on this, that's up to you. Might make it so this comes out easy someday down the line. A lot of times they like to break off into the knuckle and you'll have to drill and tap and it becomes a little bit of a pain in the butt. Okay bottomed out. I'm just going to give it a little bit and that's enough. We don't want to break it off. Okay, now we'll just feel around, make sure everything's secured. You definitely want to make sure that your ABS wire is nice and secured. It's not hanging off anywhere.

This one looks like it's doing all right. All right, let's move to the next step. Okay, so now we're going to put the wheel up onto the rotor/hub area. To do that, these wheels can be fairly heavy. I'm just going to show you something. You want to make sure you have a couple lug nuts in your hand here. It's going to be helpful. You're going to take it, roll it up against your leg, just like this. Now you're going to use your leg/core muscles, abs, whatever, to roll it up your leg and then lift with your leg and ab muscles instead of using your back. Now we're just going to get one of these lug nuts started on here. Once we have a few good threads, we can release the wheel if we need to. I have a couple lug nuts, so I'm just going to hold it.

We know the wheel can't go anywhere. Now I can grab the rest of my lug nuts and start all those on. Now all that we're going to do is bottom them out. We're going to go in a crisscross pattern or I guess in this we would look more like a snowflake. Okay, so here, here, here, here, here, here. We're never going to go around in a circle. You do that. It could kick your wheel off to the side. Think you have it tight. Even go ahead and torque it down. Think it's tight. Drive it down the road, hit a bump. Next thing you know it breaks free. Okay? So make a nice little snowflake.

Okay, they're all bottomed out. We can move to the next step of torquing them. Okay, so now we're going to torque up the wheel. We're going to use our 21 mm socket. We're going to go on a crisscross pattern, snowflake, call it whatever you want, 85 foot pounds. That one's a little looser than I could have had it, but that's all right. There we are. You want to go around again? Go around again. There we are. Easy-peasy.

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