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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.
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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.
You can replace the idler arm bracket by itself. To find the idler arm on your truck, in this case it's on the passenger side, but another easy way is to start at the tie rod end and just follow the arm all the way to your inner tie rod, and then up to your idler arm.
The first step to removing the idler is to remove the cotter pin that holds the castle nut in place. I like to use a pair of cutters to grab it with. It's usually the easiest thing to do, although I may prove myself wrong. There we go. And then you can also use a pair of locking pliers to pull it from the other side. Then you'll take your 21mm socket with an extension, and I'm using a 1/2" ratchet, because it's going to be pretty tight, and we'll crack it loose.
Luckily it's greasy, so once you crack it loose, it usually spins right off. So, ideally you want to have a puller, which you can get from your local hardware store or auto part store. You can usually rent them. And you'll want to put it on like this. We're using a two jaw puller. It wraps up on both sides of the steering arm, and then the center bolt pushes right on the idler arm. Then, in our case, it's a 16mm right here, but depending on the puller, it could be a different size. And at that point, you want to just tighten up your puller until the idler arm breaks free. We're going to be pulling off the idler arm with the idler arm bracket, so we need to take out the lower nut right here, and then the upper one right up here.
In New England we like to spray everything with rust penetrant before we take it off, because it just makes life a lot easier. On the front side of the bracket, there's the actual heads of the bolt that we're going to put a socket on. Right here's the lower one, and then up here's the upper one. So, we're going to use a 21mm with an extension, and a little wobble adapter so that we can get on there. It's not the easiest thing to reach, but once you're on there, it should stay there. And then on the back side, we put a wrench to hold the nut in place, and hopefully turn it.
Now we're heading for the top bolt on the idler arm bracket. We have our 21mm wrench on the back side, and then 21mm socket and extension on the front. At this point, we'll be able to just pull the whole idler arm, and its bracket, right out of the truck.
We've cleaned up our idler arm and idler arm bracket. Both are well used. But we're going to show you how to separate the idler arm from the bracket itself. In our case, there's a 24mm nut on here. That may differ depending on if your car has a original OEM part or if it's been replaced before. In our case, it's 24mm. So we're going to throw it in the vise, and put our 24mm socket on with a 1/2" ratchet -- because you want plenty of torque -- and hopefully we can crack this loose. With the nut off, now we have to pull the idler arm off the idler arm bracket.
So once again, I'm going to reposition this in the vise. Get a puller, which you can rent from a local hardware store, or an auto parts store, or they're actually not too expensive if you just buy them and you think you might be doing this more than once. It might be worth buying a kit to do this. And then you'll tighten down the center bolt. In our case, we have a 16mm on the top of the puller, which we will, once again, use our 1/2" ratchet to tighten up. So, you always want to wear your safety glasses when you're doing these things, safety gloves, because things tend to spring off when you're least expecting it. Kind of like that. So now that it's broken loose, you can pull it right off.
Here you can see the old idler arm bracket and the new idler arm bracket. You can see, the old one is really easy to turn. That's how you know it's worn out, because the insides of it are actually worn out. My guess is that somebody didn't grease this appropriately on a regular basis, and that's something that you need to do if you want to keep these things to lasting a long time. The new one is nice and tight like it should be, and we'll obviously grease this when we install it on the car, and then keep up with the greasing.
You know, probably every oil change we'll put some grease in this and make sure it stays in good shape for a long time. You can see that the mounting brackets are exactly the same. You can line them up, they fit the same. It comes with a new seal on the end, and of course, a new nut. In our case, we're going to be replacing the idler arm bracket and the idler arm. And this is the same process, whether you're replacing one or the other, but we always recommend doing them both at the same time since you have them both out of the vehicle. It's just a really easy thing, and it doesn't cost a whole lot more money to swap them both at the same time.
So to do this, we'll put the idler arm bracket into the vise, and we'll slide the idler arm right onto the bracket. Put the nut on there. This happens to be a 24mm. Depending on what kind of part you have in your car, it may vary. The size may vary a little bit. And at this point, we can tighten this up. So we started tightening the nut, and we found that the whole thing was spinning, like you can see here. So that's why they put a hex on top of this, so that you can put a wrench here and a wrench on the bottom, and then you can tighten down the nut much easier.
While the idler arm bracket and idler arm are out of the vehicle, we're going to put the grease in them, that way it's a little bit easier on us once they're installed. Now we can slide the whole assembly right back in. There's one bolt in place. Now we'll do the lower bolt, which is a little trickier. All right. With the top ... or, with the idler arm bracket bolts in place, then you can push the idler arm into the steering, and tighten up the castle nut, or hand tighten the castle nut. Now we're going to take our 21mm socket and extension and place it on the upper bolt. Put a wrench on the back side. Of course, we want to turn the ratchet in the proper direction, then we'll start tightening up that bolt. And then we'll go for the lower one, which again, 21mm with a ratchet and extension, and a 21mm on the back. And now we have the 21mm idler arm nut that we are going to use a ratchet and extension and socket on.
We want to get it tight enough so that it is held in place, but we also want to line up the castle nut with the hole in the idler arm, so that we can get the cotter pin through. And now you can slide the cotter pin through the hole, and bend it over so that it stays in place.
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You wanna keep in mind when you're doing this job, after you're done, you're gonna wanna go to a local garage and have the vehicle aligned so you don't have premature tire wear.
Just take this cover off. Use a 15-millimeter socket. There's two bolts on the bottom, two on top, sometimes there'll be a third. Slide it off. Take this cotter pin out. Just use some side cutters. And pull that out. Just gonna use a little rust penetrant, it's a little rusty. Take a 21-millimeter socket, take this nut off. Now I wanna separate the idler arm from the steering bar. I'm just gonna use a front-end [SP] tool. There's many different tools you could use to get this off. Just tighten this up. Put the nut on just so my tool doesn't slip off the stud. Just gonna use it as a guide. Another way you could try do this is use the pickle fork. There we go. Slide that out.
Gonna take these two bolts out. I'm gonna use a wrench, a 21-millimeter wrench backside to hold the nut. Use a 21-millimeter socket on the bolt. Take both of those out. Pull the bolts out. Just grab the whole idler arm assembly and just slide it out.
If you're gonna replace just the arm or just the assembly, you're gonna have to separate it. So use a 24-millimeter socket. It helps to put it in a vise. And then you can use a puller and separate these two. Just like that. And take the arm, put the new nut on. Just snug that up tight.
All right, just line this up. Gonna have to tap this in place. It's good.
Before you put the bolts through up top, just make sure it's going through this bar right here. We'll put the bolts in. Take the two nuts, get them on the backside. Now snug these up. Torque these bolts to 74-foot-pounds. And take the castle nut, install that there. Tighten it up. Then torque this to 46-foot-pounds. If the hole didn't line up you can just tighten it up a little bit more so you can put the cotter pin in. Slide the cotter pin in. And just bend one of the tabs over. And trim the excess. Take the shield, install it. Put the bolts back in. And tighten these up.
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Normally, there is a shield right here, you wanna take that shield off. There'll be four or five 15-millimeter bolts. Take that off, get it out of your way. Now, we're gonna take this nut off. On this vehicle, there's a cotter pin. So, I'll just use some side cutters, take this cotter pin off. Just bend it back a little bit and just pry it out. And sometimes they break. There we go. Now, I'm gonna take a 22-millimeter socket, take this nut off. Now, I wanna remove that stud from the steering linkage that goes through the idler arm. I'm gonna use a tool like this, it's gonna press it out. You can use a couple other methods. You could use a pickle fork, try to get it out this way...that way. Just gonna put the nut on to stabilize the tool so it doesn't fall off. All right. While that's on there tight, I'm just gonna give it a tap with the air hammer, see if the vibrations loosen it up. So, that didn't work out. So, I'm gonna try a pickle fork. Sometimes these are tricky to get to separate. There we go.
Now, I'm gonna take these two bolts out. I'm gonna use a 21-millimeter wrench. On the backside, there's a nut and then a 21-millimeter socket on the front. Get that nut off. Take the bolt out. And just grab the idler arm and the housing and just slide it up. If you were gonna replace one of these pieces or the other, you can separate that nut. Just gonna put the housing in the vise, make it easier to install. Take the nut off. All right. Take the idler arm, put the nut on, take a 24-millimeter socket and snug it up. Now, I'm gonna take this castle nut off. And get this in position. As you slide the housing in the bracket, you wanna make sure the idler arm goes through the steering linkage. Get the bolts lined up. And put the nuts on the backside. Now, I'll tighten these down. Then torque both of those bolts to 73 foot-pounds. Now, install the castle nut and tighten that up. And then torque this to 46 foot-pounds. And find the hole through the stud and you can use the cotter pin, slide it through. If it doesn't fit or if you can't get it to line up, you can tighten the nut up a little more so it does line up. There we go. And use some side cutters and just bend this like this. And then you can trim the excess. Now, if you have that shield right here, reinstall that shield.
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All right, friends. So, one of the first things we need to do is safely raise and support the vehicle. Once you've done that, you wanna come right upfront to this skid plate right here. Go ahead and remove all 15-millimeter bolts that hold it in. Now, that that's out of the way, let's come right over here to where the idler arm comes down through this arm right here, remove the 21-millimeter nut.
Now, the next thing we would need to do to get this arm out of here, is of course try to drop this sway bar out of the way. If your bolts look like ours do, and you think that they're gonna be an issue, I would just skip right past that and we'll come right up here and we'll remove the whole idler unit right here. To get this out of here, we're gonna use a 21-millimeter right there, and then we'll use a 21-millimeter wrench on the nut side.
Let's put a nice piece of wood in between the frame and this bar right here, just to make it so this bar can't go up too far while we hammer on this right there. Now that that's out of there, we can grab right onto this and we'll get it out of the vehicle. Now, when you're replacing your idler arm bracket assembly here, you're gonna have to remove it from the idler arm. To do that, you'd remove this nut right there, and then you'd do something as simple as a pickle fork coming in between here, or you could even use a puller to separate the two. Odds are, if your idler arm bracket assembly is no good, more than likely at the joint at the idler arm itself is no good as well. In which case I would just replace the both as a pair, that's much easier that way as you can tell. But for the purpose of this video, I'll still show you how to get them apart.
Now to remove this, I like to have it nice and level on the ground and I'll put my foot on it. I'm gonna have it so it's facing down towards the left, so when I remove this and it tries to spin, you can't go anywhere. I'm just gonna use this pickle fork right here, put it right in between the joint, and then give it a couple of loving bonks with my hammer. As you can tell, the two separated at this point, this joint is no good, but that's okay, we're replacing this anyway.
The next thing I like to do is put the unit right inside of a vise if you have access to one. You wanna grab onto this boot, take a look underneath there, make sure there's plenty of grease, go ahead and push it down, that feels great. Now we're gonna take that idler arm, set it right down on there. Take our brand new nut. You always wanna use a brand new nut, okay. So, now if I use my 24-millimeter wrench and I try to tighten this, what you're probably gonna notice is the stud on the inside is gonna start spinning once it gets to a certain point. Okay, so as you can see, it's spinning the stud. Is the nut all the way down? No it's not. So, now we're gonna use a hex bit and you wanna use an 8-millimeter. Come right inside there, that's gonna hold it and now we'll continue tightening this. Make sure it's nice and tight. That feels great.
It may be time to get our unit back up inside the vehicle here, spring it right up and in. Behind those lines, hopefully. Get that in the center link. Let's get this into its bracket. Okay, that looks decent, let's grab our two bolts. Make sure that they have washers, there right through. The other one, here we are. Let's grab the washers and the nuts for the other side. Now let's snug these up. Now let's go ahead and torque these down to 73 foot-pounds
Torqued. Let's get this nut on there. Snug it up, torque this to 46 foot-pounds. Torqued and use our locking cotter pin, slide it right on through there. And then make sure you pin it over, so there's no way this nut can come loose. Get this out of here. Awesome. Let's get this shield back up on here on, I'm gonna line up those holes. Start in all the bolts, before I tighten any of them down. Perfect. The next thing that I would wanna do, is make sure that I get it down to a reputable alignment shop.
