Chevrolet GMC Cadillac Front 13 Piece Steering & Suspension Kit TRQ PSA58753

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The pitman arm is attached to the steering box itself, and you can find it right up on the driver side of the vehicle. It is right here attached to the steering box, and then attached to part of the steering linkage as well. Typically, these wear out right at the ball joint end of it. It comes as a whole lot of slop in your steering wheel.

To access the large nut on the bottom of the Pitman arm, you have to actually loosen or remove the steering box from the frame of the truck, and we'll start that by removing the three 21 millimeter bolts that are on the driver side of the frame that hold the steering box to the frame itself. We'll start grabbing a 21 millimeter socket and a large ratchet. There's going to be a lot of force on these, so we want to use a long ratchet to do it. Right here on the ball joint end of the Pitman arm, you're going to want to remove this 21 millimeter nut with a socket and an extension. Hopefully it goes on.

With the nut off, now we have to separate the Pitman arm from the steering linkage. There's a couple ways to do this. You could use a pickle fork. I actually prefer using a puller because that is usually the most successful way that I have. You can usually rent these from a hardware store or a local auto parts store, or they're actually not too expensive to just purchase. We'll put a 16 millimeter on the puller and start putting some force on it. You basically swing it up your steering box, pull down on the linkage, and now it is somewhat out of the way.

Now you have access to the 34 millimeter nut on the bottom of the Pitman arm. This 34 millimeter nut is really, really tight, and the steering box is obviously loosened from the frame. So we need to hold the steering box in place somehow while we loosen this nut with a very large ratchet. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a large wrench, put it on this side of the frame, and run one of the steering box bolts through it and back into the steering box. Now I'm going to put a 34 millimeter socket on there with a breaker bar or a half inch drive ratchet that's quite long, and hopefully we can crack this loose.

Now we're going to take our puller and put it on the Pitman arm itself. Going to have to wiggle the steering box around a little bit and kind of get things out of the way to make sure that you have room to actually use the puller. You always want to make sure it's centered on the bolt as well because the puller won't work if it's crooked. We're going to use a ratcheting wrench in this case to tighten up the puller. The Pitman arm is not coming off with the puller, so we're going to throw a little heat on it to try and loosen it up. All right. With the Pitman arm loose, you should be able to pry it right off the steering box and hopefully pull it out of the truck.

As you can see, we got the old Pitman arm and the new Pitman arm. If you're buying a Pitman arm for one of these trucks, you'll need to know if it's a four-spline or a three-spline. What that means is inside here, in this case there's four wider splines so it can only go on one of four directions. You can see there's one here, there's one on here, and if you turn it 90 degrees you can see there's one here and one here. On the three-spline, it's triangular. You can see that they are essentially the same part. The new one comes with the castle nut and the cotter pin so that you can set it up right. It'll look and fit and function just like the original.

I prefer to have it greased before I put it in the truck because it's a little easier to grease now than when it's installed, so I have it clamped in the vice, put the grease can on it, and then just add the grease until it's full. You'll know it's full because it kind of oozes out the bottom seal. You don't want to blow out the seal completely, but as soon as you see it pop up the seal you know it's full. All right, before we put the Pitman arm back in, I'm going to take this bolt out of the steering box that I was using earlier to hold it in place. It'll give me a little freedom to work around it.

Now we can take our new Pitman arm and slide it up into place. The Pitman arm only fits on one of four ways, so there's a very good chance that you're just going to plop it on and get it right the first time. If it was wrong, it would be 90 degrees off in either direction, so I'm very confident that we have it right because it is a four-spline setup and this is really the way it came off. Next we can take the washer and the large 34 millimeter nut and put it onto the steering box.

All right, with the bolt loosely in place we can get the steering box to a place where we can get our 34 millimeter socket onto there. Then we can tighten it up. You're going to want to tighten this basically as tight as you can. If you have some air tools, air tools work really great for this. Now we're going to put this ball joint end of the Pitman arm back into the steering linkage just like that, and we'll hand tighten the castle nut onto the Pitman arm.

Now we can put in the three steering box bolts. We're just going to hand tighten them each for now. Now we're going to take your 21 millimeter socket and ratchet and we can tighten up these steering box bolts. Now we can tighten up this one. The new one actually has a 19 millimeter nut on it, so we'll just tighten that up. You'll want to line it up with the hole in the center of the bolt so that we can put a cotter pin through it to hold it in place.

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Hi, I'm Don from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and the next time you need a part for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

In this video, we're going to show you how to replace a sway bar link on this 2002 Chevy Suburban, and it's the same part and similar process on these Suburbans from 2000 and 2006. We show you on the passenger's side, but on the driver's side it's the same procedure. The items you need for this include a new sway bar link from 1AAuto.com, a 14mm and 22mm socket and ratchet, locking pliers, a hammer, and a reciprocating saw depending on the condition of your vehicle.

Remove your hubcap by loosening up these lug nut caps and pulling the hub cap. Now, you want to remove the lug nuts. If you don't have air powered tools, you want to do this while the vehicle is on the ground. You can loosen them preliminarily, raise the vehicle and remove the lug nuts the rest of the way, and pull the wheel out. Using locking pliers, clip on to the top of your stabilizer link, and then remove this 14mm bolt. We'll just fast forward as Mike does this.

Now, you want to just hammer the link through. If the link doesn't move, you may have to use a reciprocating saw and cut it. Up top is the old part; below is the new part from 1A Auto. You can see they're identical, and they'll fit exactly the same. You want to put your stabilizer link back into place, starting with a washer and a grommet, then through the hole, then another grommet, then a washer, then the tube; then, before going through the next hole, another washer and grommet; then, on the top another grommet and another washer, then the nut.

Here, we just put the jack underneath the link. That's just to push it up through and compress the washers a little bit so that you can get the nut on the other end. Once I get another nut on, you'll see I just release the jack. You want to obviously be supporting the vehicle with jack stands, and then use your jack to push the bolt of the link up through. Then, you want to tighten up the sway bar link, and you basically want to tighten it up until the rubber bushings are compressed enough so that they're the same diameter as the washers.

Put the wheel back in place, then replace each of your lug nuts and tighten them up. You want to tighten them preliminarily, lower the vehicle, then tighten them the rest of the way. Torque each lug nut in a crossing pattern to 100 foot-pounds. Replace the hubcap, and just tighten up those lug nut caps.

We hope this video 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.

Now one of the first things you're going to want to do before you start any job is to make sure you're safe as possible. You want to have safety glasses and hand protection at all times. The next thing you're going to want to do is safely raise and support your vehicle so that your wheel is off the ground. Next, if there's a center cap, remove the plastic center cap and that'll expose your lug nuts. Remove all six using a 22-millimeter socket. Remove your wheel.

Now that we have a nice clear view of our tie rods, I'm going to spray down this area right here. This is the adjustment area. Use a little bit of penetrant. That's going to help you along. Using some nice long pliers, I'm going to grab right onto this and I'm going to turn it clockwise. That'll break free this jam nut. Okay, that broke free. Let's remove the nut that holds that outer tie rod end to the knuckle. Now we're going to hit right here on the knuckle to break our outer tie rod end free from the knuckle.

Turn your outer tie rod end counter-clockwise and count the amount of times it turns around as you remove it. One, two, three, and so on. Okay. Write down that corresponding number so you can remember. Now it's going to be time to get the inner tie rod end off of here. Here's the new inner tie rod end. And if you were to look right along this edge right here, that's the area we're going to need to grab onto, and then turn this counter-clockwise to break it free and eventually remove it. So we'll come right under here with our nice long pliers and get it off of there. There we go.

There it is friends. Now it's going to be time to install our new inner tie rod end. You might notice that there's no grease fitting to be able to grease this. Really there is. The grease is going to come right through that hole right there and that'll happen through here, starting at this point right here at this fitting. Put grease here, it comes right through and then of course it fills up the boot on the inner tie rod end. All right. I put some thread locker on here. I'm just going to go ahead and start this thing by hand. Now that we have that, as far as we can get it by hand, let's go ahead and snug it up with our pliers. Bottomed out. Just give it a teeny bit more. Awesome. Let's remove that jam nut. Let's put a little bit of copper never seize on the inner tie rod end threads, and then we'll just work that jam nut up the inner tie rod end quite a bit here. Now that we have the threaded area coded, we have our outer tie rod end, let's go ahead and put that on. And we're going to count it in the same amount of threads that we counted the original one off. That was one, two, three, and so on.

Okay? Just bring this so it's close. Put that node off of there. Put this on there. Let's bottom that out. Now we're going to torque this nut to 48 foot-pounds. All right. So now that we have that torqued, we need to pay special attention to where the slot on the castle nut lines up with the hole in the stud. If it doesn't line up, you need to continue tightening until it does. Okay. So that looks pretty good. Let's try it. That slides right through, just pin it over. The cotter pin is going to ensure that there's no way that this nut can come loose. Now it's going to be time to tighten up your jam nut. To tighten this, we're going to turn it counter-clockwise. When you torque it, you would want to torque it to 37 foot-pounds if you have the ability.

Okay. Just make sure that it's nice and snug. By the time you're finished, make sure your outer tie rod end is nice and parallel to the ground or at least as parallel as it can be. Now it's going to be time to get the grease fitting out of here. Use your 8-millimeter. There it is. Let's clean off around the area. Grab your new grease fitting. We'll start it right in there by hand, and then we'll snug it up, nice and tight. Let's give it a little grease

Now let's get the wheel back up on here. Okay. Now with the wheel barely on the ground so it can't spin, we're going to torque the lug nuts to 140 foot-pounds. Torqued. If you have a center cover, put it on there now. Now that you've finished your service, go ahead and take it for a road test and make sure you get it down to a local reputable alignment shop.

One of the first things we need to do is safely raise and support the vehicle, so the wheel is off the ground. Let's remove our 22-millimeter lug nuts. Remove your wheel.

Now that the wheel's off of here, we have a clear view of the sway bar link. What you're going to notice is, up along the top, it has a strange-looking nut. It's very thin. It's going to be hard to grab onto. I'm going to use a pair of locking pliers to try to grab onto it. Using my 15-millimeter socket, I'm going to come down from the bottom here. Now I'm going to use my 14-millimeter socket down along the bottom here, see if we can get this to come apart. Looks like it's starting to turn.

Okay. So, for us, the outer sheath on this broke free from the bolt itself that's supposed to be running through the center, so I'm just going to go ahead and spray this down with some penetrant, let that soak down and through there. Sometimes, what happens is, is this outer portion will actually freeze or get stuck onto the bolt. If that's the case, what you would either want to do is grab onto the outer portion with some locking pliers, and then try to spin out that bolt. If that doesn't work, you might have to just cut the bolt itself. There's the bolt. Let's get all this out of here. Awesome.

So, now, assuming you're doing the sway bar links as a pair, now is the best time to go ahead and start doing the other side as well. Okay. Once you have both sides out, you should be able to move the bar around a little bit at this point. We're going to grab our new sway bar links. We take off the nut, take off the washer and the bushing, the washer and the bushing, and then, of course, the sheath, washer and bushing again, and we're going to leave it just like this.

Now, as we come up, okay, coming up from under the control arm, we still have the bolt with the washer and the bushing. Now we're going to take our bushing with our washer, put that facing down and towards the control arm. Grab your spacer, put that on there. We're going to push this up a little bit further. Now you're going to go washer, facing up, bushing. Get it underneath that sway bar. Bring it up. Bushing again.

If you were to look at these bushings, you can tell that they have like a rounded area, and then they have this area right here with a little like a piton. The piton is going to be going either towards the control arm or towards the sway bar. Set that on there, this one right here, and then, of course, our locking nut. I like to use a little thread locker on these.

I'm just going to use my 14-millimeter wrench, and of course, my ratchet underneath, and I'm going to start snugging it up. As I snug it, I want to be watching these bushings. What I want to see is the bushing touching up against the bar, on both sides of course. And, of course, down by the control arm there, we want those bushings to be touching up against it as well. We don't necessarily want to continue tightening, though, until the point where they seem like they're getting squished down and even pancaking out. So, let's just snug them up so they're all touching at least, and then we'll continue on.

Okay. So, this looks great. As you can tell, all of my bushings are touching exactly where they need to be touching. And you're also going to notice that I didn't continue tightening until they flattened out, like I had said before. This looks pretty great, so I'm just going to take a quick measurement of it. It looks like it's approximately the width of my thumb, personally, so I'm going to make sure that I go approximately the same on the other side of the vehicle.

Okay. Now it's going to be time to get the wheel up on here. Slide it on. Now we'll get the lug nuts on here, we'll bottom them out, and then we'll torque them to manufacturer specifications. Let's torque these lug nuts to 140 foot-pounds. Torqued.

Take the center cap off, we'll just use a straight blade screwdriver. Just get behind here. Slide it off. The lug nuts off. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Now take the wheel off. You need some pliers on the top of the link. Right here. Just watch out for the brake hose. And then underneath, I'm going to use a 14-millimeter socket. There we go. Cut the top off. And slide the bolt straight through like that. Can use a large pry bar. Just pry up. Just take this piece out. Just be careful, don't pry on the steering. I was prying through the frame in the back there. All right. The new link, I'm just going to take this top piece off, set it aside, and you're going to need to take these pieces off as well. And slide this lower part through and then put the bushing, the washer in the same...pretty much the same how it came out. Then up top. Put the bushing, and the washer, and the nut.

Use a 14-millimeter wrench on the nut and a 14-millimeter socket on the bottom. Tighten this up. Then we're going to torque this nut to 89-inch-pounds. That's good. Just make sure the top of this bolt is not rubbing on the brake line. And if it is, then you could always trim the top of the bolt or you can always invert it and have the bolt going straight down.

And put the wheel back on and the lug nuts. And now I'm gonna torque these lug nuts in a star pattern or cross pattern to 140-foot-pounds to tighten the wheel down evenly. And just go around again, double-check. And put the center cap on.

You want to keep in mind when you're doing this job, after you're done, you're gonna want to 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 in 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 up. Just gonna use a little rust penetrant. It's a little rusty. Take a 21-millimeter socket. Take this nut off.

Now, I want to separate the idler arm from the steering bar. I'm just gonna use a front-end 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. It's just gonna use it as a guide.

Another way you can try to do this is use a pickle fork. There we go. Slide that up. I'm going to take these two bolts out. I'm going to 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. Let me just grab the whole idler arm assembly and you just slide it off.

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.

I'm gonna have to tap this in place. That's good. Before you put the bolts through up top, just make sure it's going through this bar right here. Put the bolts in, take the two nuts. Get them on the back side. Now, snug these up. Torque to 74 foot-pounds. And take the castle nut, install that there, tighten it up and 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 this shield, install it bolts, put the back in, and tighten these up.

So before you do this job, you wanna keep in mind that after you're done, you're gonna have to go to an alignment shop and have the vehicle aligned so you don't burn out your tires and have premature tire wear. Now, I'm gonna remove the wheel. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Take off the lug nuts. Take the wheel off.

Now, I wanna get this wheel speed sensor wire out of the way. I'm gonna use a trim tool to remove the hold downs, this one right there and right here. And then disconnect the connector up top. I just wanna move it out of the way. Now, I'm gonna remove this bracket for the brake hose. I'm gonna use a 10-millimeter socket to take this bolt out. Oh. And sometimes they'll break. That's okay. Just set it aside.

Now, I'm gonna loosen up this nut. I'm not gonna completely take it off. I just wanna loosen it using an 18-millimeter wrench. All right. So I'll leave a couple of threads on there. That's good. Now, I'm gonna break the ball joint free from the knuckle. I'm gonna use a pickle fork. You could try tapping the knuckle, but you wanna be careful. You don't wanna break it. Just watch out for the brake hose. Make sure you're not hitting the brake hose on the other side. There we go.

Now, I'm gonna support the lower control arm with a jack stand. I wanna take the load off the upper control arm. Just lower it onto that. You could always use a floor jack. All right. Now, I'm gonna take a pry bar and just pry down on the control arm and then I can take the nut off of the ball joint. And if the stud starts spinning, just pry down on the pry bar a little bit more and then take that nut off.

You can slide the knuckle out. I could leave it right there for now. I'm gonna take these bolts out next. So that you don't break the axle, you wanna make sure that you keep the knuckle pulled in towards the vehicle so it doesn't pull out too far. So you can always use a strap like this and just tie this down so it doesn't fall out. Right now, I'm gonna use a 21-millimeter wrench on the bolt here and either a 13/16 or a 20-millimeter wrench on this side. Loosen the nut up. I might need a breaker bar. Yep.

Or you can use a 21-millimeter socket as well. Break it free. Loosen up the nut. And then take that nut off. You can take this cam off. This is like a washer that's adjustable. You can use some type of pry tool. And just slide that out. I'm gonna use an air hammer with a hammerhead and just push this bolt out. To get this bolt out, if this bracket is in your way, you can just tip up the control arm. Use a 13-millimeter socket to take this bolt out. Just slide the bracket out of your way. Just be careful not to bend the brake line. Now, just take a punch and a hammer and just tap it out the rest of the way. And you can do the same on the other side. And when you're taking that other side out, you don't have to take the shock out. You just have to rotate the cam so that it goes behind the shock.

Now, I'll just grab the upper control arm, and work it back and forth, then you can slide it up. And take the new arm. Just slide it in position and then take the bolts with the inside cam. There we go. All right. So on the outside of these cams, these have these little nylon or plastic spacers right here. That's going to make it so the alignment's close to where it should be. It's not gonna be exact. You still need to get an alignment done after you're done. So when you put these on and you put that tab through that hole, if you still have these on the vehicle, then it's gonna be close. That'll get you somewhat close to where it should be. Install the nuts. There we go.

All right. So when I go to torque these 2 bolts down, what I wanna use is my 13-millimeter, 13/16 wrench. And I want this upper control arm to be as close to ride height as possible. Ideally, you put this all back together and put the weight of the vehicle on it, and then retorque that. But that's not that easy to get to. So try to get the upper control arm as close to ride height as possible. Sometimes you take a 12-millimeter socket, just stick it under here, and that's pretty close.

And then you wanna torque this to 140 foot pounds, both this one and the other one. And once those are all torqued, you can take the socket out. Now, I can take this strap out of the way, and take the brake hose, line this back up. Put the bolt in and snug it up. Now, I'll get the ball joint lined up. You might have to use a pry bar. Get the nut started. Now, I'm gonna pry down on the control arm and then tighten that nut. Use a 19-millimeter ratchet wrench. Then if you have the ability to torque this nut, you're gonna wanna torque that to 37 foot pounds or do the best you can.

That's good. Now, I'll take this bracket for the brake hose and take a bolt. Put the bolt back in and snug it up. Take the ABS wire or the wheel speed sensor harness, and reposition this. And plug the connector back in. That's good. All right. Now you can take the grease fitting and put that in the ball joint. Get that started. And use a 7-millimeter wrench and just snug it up and give it a couple pumps. You can watch the boot of the ball joint, and then once you see it move, then it should be good enough. That's good. Now, I'm gonna raise the vehicle and reinstall the wheel. And put the lug nuts on. Now, I'm gonna torque these lug nuts to 140 foot pounds in a cross pattern to tighten the wheel down evenly. I'll just go around again and double-check.

Now one of the first things you're gonna wanna do before you start any job is to make sure you're safe as possible. You wanna have safety glasses and hand protection at all times. The next thing you're gonna wanna do is safely raise and support your vehicle so that your wheels are off the ground. Next, if there's a center cap, remove the plastic center cap and that will expose your lug nuts. Remove all 6 using a 22-millimeter socket. Remove your wheel. Now that we have a nice clear view of our tire rods, I'm gonna spray down this area right here. This is the adjustment area. Use a little bit of penetrant. That's gonna help you along. Using some nice long pliers, I'm gonna grab right onto this and I'm gonna turn it clockwise. That'll break free this jam nut. Okay, that broke free. Let's remove the nut that holds the outer tie rod end to the knuckle.

Now we're gonna hit right here on the knuckle to break our outer tie rod end free from the knuckle. Turn your outer tie rod end counterclockwise and count the amount of times it turns around as you remove it. One, two, three and so on. Okay. Write down that corresponding number so you can remember. We have our outer tie rod end. Let's go ahead and put that on. And we're gonna count it in the same amount of threads that we counted the original one off. That was one, two, three and so on. Okay. Just bring this so it's close. Get that nut off of there. I'm gonna put this on there. Let's bottom that out. Now we're gonna torque this nut to 48 foot-pounds. All right. So now that we have that torqued, we need to pay special attention to where the slot on the castle nut lines up with the hole in the stud. If it doesn't line up, you need to continue tightening until it does. Okay, so that looks pretty good. Let's try it.

That slides right through. Spin it over. The cotter pin's gonna ensure that there's no way that this nut can come loose. Now it's gonna be time to tighten up your jam nut. To tighten this we're gonna turn it counter clockwise. When you torque it, you would wanna torque it to 37 foot-pounds if you have the ability. Let's see here. Okay. Just make sure that it's nice and snug. By the time you're finished, make sure your outer tie rod end is nice and parallel to the ground or at least as parallel as it can be. Now let's get the wheel back up on here. Okay. Now with the wheel barely on the ground so it can't spin, we're gonna torque the lug nuts to 140 foot-pounds. Torqued. If you have a center cover, put it on there now. Now that you've finished your service, go ahead and take it for a road test and make sure you get it down to a local reputable alignment shop.

Before you start, you wanna be aware that after you're done this job, you're gonna wanna go to an alignment specialist so that you can have the vehicle aligned so you don't wear out the tires prematurely.

I'm gonna remove the wheel. Use a 22-millimeter socket, take the lug nuts off. And take the wheel off.

I'm gonna loosen up the jam nut. You can use a 22-millimeter wrench or a 7/8 wrench. Just get that loose. That's good. I'm just gonna spray a little rust penetrant on here. Gonna use an 18-millimeter socket, take this nut off. And if the nut doesn't come off and the stud starts spinning, you can use an 8-millimeter socket to hold that stud from spinning and then just use the wrench to take the nut off. Now you can take a hammer and just give a tap on the bottom of the tir rod or take a pickle fork and separate it this way. Just if you use a pickle fork, it's probably gonna rip the boot right here. So I'm just gonna give it a hit right here. There we go. And now we're gonna take the outer tie rod off. As we unscrew this, just count the threads. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 23, 24. So write that number down and when you go to put it back together, you're gonna count them to put the other one in the same position that that one was in.

And take the new tie rod end. Get this started. Make sure you count. One, 2, 3, 4, 5, 22, 23, 24. And line this up in the knuckle. Take the castle nut. Get that started. Now what you can do is to prevent the stud from spinning, you can take a prybar. Just pry in between the knuckle and pry down on the tie rod. Use an 18-millimeter socket and tighten this up. And tighten this to 37 foot-pounds. And then just check to see where the stud...where the hole is for the castle nut and if you need to, you can snug it up a little bit more to get it to line up. And that hole lines up. Now take the cotter pin, slide it through. Should slide through this way. And take some side cutters and just bend it. Just tap it out of the way. And then trim off the excess. And we'll snug up the jam nut. And tighten that to 50 foot-pounds.

Put the wheel back on. And the lug nuts. Now we're gonna tighten these lug nuts down to 140 foot-pounds and I'm gonna do it in a cross pattern to tighten the wheel down evenly. And just go around again, double-check.

Take the center cap off. Use a straight-blade screwdriver. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Take the lug nuts off. Pull the wheel off. These bolts are pretty rusty so I'm just going to use some rust penetrant and soak those before I start. Before we take this nut off, we just want to mark this cam right here. This is for the alignment. When you go to put this back together, you want to put this in the same location so at least it's close. You're still going to need to get an alignment done afterwards, but this will get it a little bit closer. I want to get this ABS wire out of the way, our wheel speed sensor wire. Disconnect the connector up here. Just push up on that tab, slide it out and use a trim tool. Just pull up on that retainer. You can do the same over here, and right here. Sometimes these ones break, just be careful. All right. So this piece is going to break so I'm just going to disconnect it right from the arm itself. And disconnect this right here. Sometimes you can use a screwdriver and just pop that out, or a needle-nose pliers also works. You just squeeze those together. I'm just going to put some rust penetrant on this bolt right here. Let that soak a little bit. We want to take that off next. Just remove this bracket. Use a 10-millimeter socket. Remove this bolt. It's probably going to break. Yup, it broke. Well, hopefully yours doesn't break. And slide that off.

All right. Now, we're going to take this nut off using an 18-millimeter wrench. Now I'm going to leave this nut on just a couple of threads, and then we're going to break this upper ball joint free from the knuckle. I'm going to use a pickle fork to break this free. Just slide it in, in between the ball joint and the knuckle and just give it a hit. There we go. Take the pickle fork out and just push down the upper control arm a little bit. You might need a pry bar. And take the nut off and you could slide it out. And just make sure that there's not too much tension on the brake line, brake hose. I'm going to take a 21-millimeter wrench, 21-millimeter socket. Now this is old and rusty so I just had to heat up that nut to break it loose. Normally you wouldn't have to do that. And loosen it up. That nut's pretty hot right now so I'm just going to let that cool down before I take that off. Take that nut off and see if you can pry this cam off. This is just the alignment cam. Just use a pry bar and a hammer. And just pry that off. All right. This cam bolt is stuck in there pretty good so I'm just going to use some more rust penetrant, soak it down for a while.

Here we go. All right. Get that out and do the same for the other side. All right. I'm just going to take this bracket out of the way. Just use a 13-millimeter socket and you can just slide it out of the way. Don't bend it too much. Here we go. And just use a pry bar and you can pry the arm out. And take the new control arm and just line it up. You can take a rubber mallet, or a dead-blow hammer to tap it in if you need to. And get the bolt started. And take this cam and the nut. Get the nut started. Now we tighten this up. Now we want to align that mark up. What you do is take your 21-millimeter wrench and just move the bolt on this side until that lines up. And you can snug that down. And we'll do the same for the other side. All right. Now, we're going to torque this nut to 140-foot-pounds. Do the same on the front one. Take this brake hose bracket and install that. Put the bolt back in and tighten that up. Get the nut off. Put that aside. Get this lined up with the upper knuckle. And I'll use a pry bar, just pry this down. Take the nut and get the nut started.

Now, I'm going to use a 19-millimeter ratchet wrench, while I'm using the pry bar to pry it down on the ball joint. Tighten this up. All right. Now, if you have the ability, just torque this with a torque wrench, you can torque this to 37-foot-pounds. Do the best you can. And if the stud starts spinning, you can use an allen key, that's a six-millimeter hex key. But if you use the pry bar and you just pry it down, you should be able to get that without having the stud spinning. Take this brake hose bracket and line that up. Put the nut on or the bolt in and snug it up. And take the wheel speed sensor wire and reconnect that. And then we have this holder or clip. Install that. Lock that in place. Reinstall this clip and connect the connector. And push the retainer. I'm just going to find the hole where it goes. There it is. And lock that in position. And take this fitting. Install that. Snug it up with a seven-millimeter wrench.

And take a grease gun and give it a couple pumps of grease. What you can do is look at the boot as you're greasing it, once you see the boot start to move, that's good enough. And put the wheel back up. Put the lug nuts on. Now I'm going to torque these lug nuts to 140-foot-pounds in any star pattern to tighten the wheel down evenly. And just go around again, double check. Install the center cap.

Before you start, you wanna be aware that after you're done this job, you're gonna wanna go to an alignment specialist so that you can have the vehicle aligned so you don't wear out the tires prematurely.

I'm gonna remove the wheel. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Take the lug nuts off. And take the wheel off. I'm gonna loosen up the jam nut. You can use a 22-millimeter wrench or a 7/8 wrench. Just get that loose. That's good. I'm just gonna spray a little rust penetrant on here. And use an 18-millimeter socket, take this nut off. And if the nut doesn't come off and the stud starts spinning, you can use an 8-millimeter socket to hold that stud from spinning, and then just use the wrench to take the nut off. Now you can take a hammer and just give a tap on the bottom of the tie rod, or take a pickle fork and separate it this way. Just if you use a pickle fork, it's probably gonna rip the boot right here. I'm just gonna give it a hit right here. There we go. And now we're gonna take the outer tie rod off. As we unscrew this, just count the threads. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 23, 24. So write that number down. And when you go to put it back together, you're gonna count them to put the other one in the same position that that one was in.

Now I'm gonna take off the inner tie rod end. I'm gonna use a large adjustable wrench because I don't have a wrench that's big enough to fit this. Slide this over and loosen it up. And eventually we'll get that off. Take the inner tie rod end and get this started. Now we're gonna tighten this up with the adjustable wrench. If you have the ability to torque this, you wanna torque this to 74-foot-pounds. Just do the best you can. That's good. Then you wanna take a grease gun and hook it up to this grease fitting and give it a couple pumps. You can do it until you start seeing the boot move a little bit, then you know there's plenty of grease in there. And take the new tie rod end. Get this started. Make sure you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 22, 23, 24 and line this up in the knuckle. Take the castle nut, get that started. Now, what you can do is to prevent the stud from spinning, you can take a pry bar, just pry in between the knuckle and pry down on the tie rod, use an18-millimeter socket and tighten this up. And tighten this to 37-foot-pounds. And then just check to see where the hole is for the castle nut. And if you need to, you can snug it up a little bit more to get it to line up. And that that hole lines up. Now take the cotter pin, slide it through, actually we'll slide it through this way and take some side cutters and just bend it. Tap it out of the way, and then trim off the excess. And we'll snug up the jam nut and tighten that to 50-foot-pounds. Put the wheel back on and the lug nuts. I'm gonna take these lug nuts down to 140-foot-pounds, and I'm gonna do it in a cross pattern to tighten the wheel down evenly. Just go around again. Double-check.

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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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-something years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this, to show you the correct way to install parts from 1A Auto.com. The right parts, installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you, and enjoy the video.

In this video I'm going to show you inner and outer tie rod replacement. This truck actually just needed the inner, but if you're replacing the inner, you might as well replace the outer as well. These tie rods fit this whole generation of GM trucks and SUV's - trucks from 98 - 06 and SUV's from 99 - 07.
The tools you'll need are a jack and jack stands, a 22 mm lug wrench or socket and ratchet. You'll need either a 35 mm wrench or a 12 inch adjustable wrench that can go to 35 mm and then you'll need a second adjustable wrench as well, a tie rod removal tool, a grease gun, torque wrench, and pliers.
The clunking noise was the inner tie rod. You can see here, when I shake the tire back and forth you'll see the inner tie rod move but that steering arm inside doesn't move, so you know there's play in there and it needs to be replaced.

Start out by raising and securing the vehicle on a jack stand and then remove your cap and wheel. We're going to remove this bolt. We've got a ratchet. If you don't have a breaker bar, use a ratchet and a piece of pipe. The bolt should come off pretty easily. Take the bolts off most of the way. I'm planning on replacing the outer tie rod as well, so I'm going to use a pickle fork to separate it. The best way to go about this is to get the wrench on it from underneath and push. That should break her free. I'm just going to speed up as I pull that out. You want to make sure that your outer tie rod spins with the wrench so the whole assembly spins and you don't shorten or lengthen the tie rod -- the inner and outer tie rod assembly.

There's your whole assembly out. If you can see here, I've got my old assembly, inner tie rod and outer tie rod, and I want to measure right from the edge of this surface here right to the end. I'm taking my new inner tie rod and outer tie rod and I put them together, just to compare. This will give you a good preliminary alignment. We'll put this nut a little closer. We can put it together now. It will be a good preliminary alignment until you can get your vehicle to a shop where you can get a real alignment.

I'm just leaving my nut right there and spinning my outer tie rod off. The nut marks the place where your tie rod was and then taking off that outer tie rod just makes it easier to get the inner one on. That allows me put my inner tie rod on. Speed it up here as I use the wrench to tighten the tie rod up. Then I can put my outer tie rod right back on and go right up to the nut. Then I'll just fast-forward here as I put that outer tie rod back on the inner tie rod. Now I'm just taking the nut or just getting the outer tie rod in place. Take the nut off the new tie rod, and I'm just going to get some of the debris off the steering knuckle there, and then you can push on the stud on the tie rod and get it lined up with the steering knuckle, and then push it up and in, and start your nut back on.

We'll tighten this up to 65 foot-pounds. Pull a little tighter here and we can get this cotter pin through. We'll fast-forward here as we install the cotter pin and bend the end over and then use a 7 mm wrench and install our grease fitting. We'll take a wrench screw up here. The other one holds the outer tie rod and just tighten up the block nut. Now you want to use a grease gun and grease both the joint for the outer tie rod and the inner tie rod.

Use some more fast-forward here. As you put the wheel and tire back on, start all the lug nuts one by one by hand first, then use your wrench to preliminary tighten them, then you can lower the vehicle back down on the ground, torque the lug nuts to 120 foot-pounds. I'm using a crossing pattern and then I do it one more time, go around all eight and make sure they're tight. Then you can put your center cap back on and you should be all set.

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One of the first things you want to do is safely raise and support your vehicle by the frame so your suspension can hang. Once you've done that, take a small pry bar and we're going to take off this center cap. If you were to spin it, you're going to see a little notch in the cap. Just carefully slide this off of here. That exposes our 22-millimeter lug nuts. Remove all six. Remove your wheel. Now let's remove our 21-millimeter nut. Let's just put that nut on, just a couple threads. Now we're going to take a hammer and we're going to hit right here on the knuckle. You want to be very careful for your brake rotor.

Now that the wheel is off, we have a clear view of where we're going to start working. We're going to disconnect the electrical, this is the ABS right here, and it's very delicate. I'm just gonna come right up along here, and you're gonna see where it's supposed to be mounted to the frame. Should be pretty secure. This is missing about half of its clip, so I'll make sure I secure it in afterward. This purple right here is a little lock, it's holding it from coming separated. I like to just come right in between here, pop that up. Now we'll separate this, just take a peek, make sure you don't see any funny colors. If you were to come right down along here, we're gonna get this clip off of here as well. Just give it a little twist, lift it up, grab that ABS wire, carefully set it aside. The next thing we're going to do is remove this 10-millimeter headed bolt. The next thing we're gonna do is remove the nut that holds the upper ball joint to the knuckle. Okay. That comes right off. I'm just gonna go ahead and put it on there just a couple threads for now. Now let's use a 36-millimeter socket to remove our axle nut. Behind there, there's a washer. Go ahead and remove that as well. Let's go ahead and blast this with some penetrant.

The next thing we need to do is separate the axle from the bearing. I'm going to use this punch right here and go right in the center. You definitely don't wanna use a hammer and potentially damage the threads. The next thing we need to do is remove our mounting bolts that hold the caliper to the knuckle, use an 18-millimeter. Carefully hang your caliper, so it's putting no pressure on your flex hoses. So, now let's just double-check to make sure this upper ball joint nut is still on there a few good threads, it hasn't loosened upon us. And then we'll move down here to the lower ball joint nut. Remove that as well. Take that, and just put it on a couple threads.

Okay, so now it's gonna be time to separate the upper ball joint from the knuckle right here. Pay special attention to anything that's delicate that you don't want ruined, such as an ABS wire. Make sure that that's secure and safely out of the way. Go ahead and take your nice little hammer. And we're going to bonk right here on the knuckle itself. As you can tell it's separated, we can move along. So, now let's push down on this. Remove that nut. And carefully draw this down. Now if you're worried the knuckle with a rotor is going to be too heavy, you can go ahead and use a Torx bit right here, remove that bolt, and take the rotor right off. The problem with removing it like that is you're gonna have to clean up the mating surface between the wheel bearing and the rotor itself. So, now I'm going to take my hammer again and I'm going to come right down here and we're going to hit right on the knuckle itself until this comes down. There we are. Carefully lift up, remove the ball joint nut. Carefully lower this down, remove your knuckle.

The next thing you're going to want to do is support your lower control arm so that you're not putting maximum pressure on your front shock/strut. If you are, you can potentially damage it, because we're going to be using a hammer and we're going to hit right here on the lower ball joint to break it free.

Now to install the lower ball joint, we're gonna want to take the boot off of it first. So, I'm just going to use a nice small screwdriver, pry bar, weasel it in between. Then just kind of separate the two. Be careful not to damage the boot, of course, because we're going to be using it. The next thing we need is a ball joint kit with a cup that's going to fit right up against this lip. We're going to come right underneath, and then we're going to press this right up and in. Right along the bottom. I'm going to use a cup that looks like this, with a hole in the bottom, that's for the stud to go through. It's going to press right up against this ridge right here. Take this cup, something that's hollow enough to make sure that the top part of the ball joint can fit inside. Put it right over the top. Now we're going to take our ball joint C-clamp, put it right over the top, bottom it out. Just check to make sure that the cup is centered to approximately where the ball joints going to be.

Now we're going to tighten this up. As we do that, we want to check this ridge and make sure it matches up directly along this control arm. As you can tell, the ball joint ridge is directly against the control arm right here. Before I release any pressure, I'm just going to give the control arm a couple light bonks with my hammer, just for a little bit of vibration to help make sure this is seated securely. That should be pretty great. Carefully remove your tool. Make sure you install your clamp. To do that, just use these little pliers right here. They fit inside the holes, and then you can spread it. Slide it right over. Make sure it's sitting inside the roof all the way around. If it isn't, just work at it until it is. Now we're going to install our boot. Just carefully bring it up here. I like to try to start it on one side, so I'll go on the side farthest away from me. Then I'll use some pliers and just kind of roll the lip right on. Obviously, be careful not to poke any holes in the boot. Inspect it for any damage. Make sure that it's completely secured. This looks perfect.
Go ahead and take your knuckle. I'm going to start it on the axle a little bit, then slide it over the lower ball joint stud. Lift it up. Kink it to the side and start on that lower ball joint nut. Wiggle the axle around. Should slide right in. Now we're going to use a bar, we're going to pull this upper ball joint down into here. Get the nut, go ahead and start it on there. Just going to take my bar, and try to hold pressure on the lower ball joint to the knuckle. And then we're going to go ahead and try to tighten it up. So, now you'd want to torque this to 37-foot-pounds. If for some reason you can't get your torque wrench in there, like I can't, I would just continue with my wrench and make sure it's nice and tight. [vocalization]. Perfect.

Now it's time to torque up that lower ball joint nut as well. Torque it to 37-foot-pounds. Now what we want to do is make sure that our slot is lined up with the hole that goes through the ball joint stud, so we can make sure we install our cotter pin. Go ahead and slide that through. If for some reason yours is not lined up when you torqued it, you need to continue tightening, not loosening, until it's lined up with the next available slot. Go ahead and peen that over and lock it in. All right. So, now it's gonna be time to get the caliper on here. Just go ahead and slide it right over the rotor. Now we're gonna line up those bolt holes. I like to use some red threadlocker on these bolts. And start them in there. Okay. Let's bottom them out. Now let's go ahead and torque these 248-foot-pounds. Now we'll just go ahead and take that tie rod end, put right through the knuckle. Take your nut, start it on there. We're gonna bottom it out. Now you're gonna torque this to 44-foot-pounds. That's torqued.

The next thing we're gonna do is look to see if we can find the hole in the stud of the tie rod and match it with the next corresponding slot on the tie rod stud nut. This doesn't line up, so what I need to do now is I need to continue tightening until it does. I can see right through. I'm going to grab that locking cotter pin and install it. Slide that right on through and just peen it over. There's no way that this nut can come loose. Now it's going to be time to get the washer with the axle nut on there. Go ahead and slide the pair on. Go ahead and use your 36-millimeter socket, bottom it out, and then we'll torque it. Just gonna put a little splash of never-seize in here, I've got my mounting bolt. Let's use our 10-millimeter and snug it up. Make sure it's fully secured, make sure there's nothing binding your flex hose for your brakes are not twisted in any way.

Now it's time to get our ABS wire re-secured. Let's go ahead and put it in right here. Make sure it cannot come loose. If this can hang around and move around, it could potentially get damaged. Go ahead and connect this in now. Listen for a click, give it a tug. Go ahead and slide in your lock. Now we're going to take our mounting hardware here and just slide it right down in there. It's just a little push clip. Give it a nice tug, make sure it's definitely secured.

So, of course, next, you'd want to go ahead and torque down this nut right here. And that's going to be torqued to 177-foot-pounds. You can do that several ways. If you were to just do it like this, what you're going to notice is it just keeps spinning. If that was the case, what you would do is you can use a pry bar coming straight through these lug studs like this down to the ground. And so it holds it from spinning on you and then you would torque it. If you didn't want to go through the process doing that you can go ahead and throw the wheel up on there and then go through the center hole, which is the way that I'm going to do it.

We'll grab those lug nuts, start them all on there. Let's bottom these out. Now we'll bring it down to the ground and we'll make it so the wheel is just barely touching enough so the wheel can't spin. It's time to torque down this axle nut, 177-foot pounds like I said. Torqued. Now let's do the lug nuts,140-foot-pounds. Go crisscross. Torqued. Now it's gonna be time to get the center cover on. Before you go ahead and pound it on there, just take a look at the back, you're going to see something that looks a lot like a valve stem. Line it up. It's gonna go pretty much just like this. Light bonk, and then, of course, clean up your wheel, make it look nice and pretty and take it for a road test.

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All right, to find the idler arm on your truck—it's on the passenger side—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 idler arm is on the passenger side, and it bolts to the frame of the vehicle and to the steering itself. You can watch the play in it by just moving the tire back and forth forcefully with your hand. There shouldn't be any sort of play in between the idler arm and the steering shaft itself. That is actually the problem here. The vehicle failed inspection because there's too much play here. It's actually to a point where it's actually becoming dangerous, because this is actually going to break apart pretty soon. We want to get in here and replace the idler arm.

The first step to removing the idler is removing the cotter pin that holds the nut in place. I think 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. Then you can also use a pair of locking pliers to pull it from the other side. Then you'll take your 21-millimeter socket with an extension, and I'm using a 1/2 inch 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.

Ideally, you want to have a puller, which you can get from your local hardware store or auto parts store. You can usually rent them. 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 16-millimeter right here, but depending on the puller it could be a different size. 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 penetrator because we take it off because it just makes life a lot easier. On the front side of the bracket, there's the actually heads of the bolt that we're going to put a socket on. Right here is the lower one. Then up here is the upper one. We're going to use a 21-millimeter 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. Then on the backside we'll 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 21-millimeter wrench on the backside and then 21-millimeter 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 like so. With the idler arm off the truck, we put it in a vice, and you can see how much movement there is in it. There obviously shouldn't be any. That should be nice and tight.

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 24-millimeter nut on here. That may differ depending on if your car has an original OEM part or if it's been replaced before. In our case, it's 24-millimeter. We're going to throw it in the vice and put our 24 millimeter socket on with a 1/2 inch ratchet because you want plenty or 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.

Once again I'm going to reposition this in the vice. 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. Then you'll tighten down the center bolt. In our case, we have a 16-millimeter on the top of the puller, which we will once again use our 1/2 inch ratchet to tighten up. 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. Now that it's broken loose, you can pull it right off.

Here are the idler arms. You can see the old one right here. This one has a ton of play in this section. I think it's probably due to the fact that somebody didn't grease this on a regular basis. Usually, if you put the grease in and then forget about it for the next 100,000 miles, it's going to wear out the inside, and you're going to need to replace the whole thing again. This one obviously comes with a new greaseable fitting on the top. The key is you just want to make sure that you properly grease these on a regular basis, and it'll pretty much last as long as you take care of it. It also does come with a little foam piece on the bottom like the original has. Yeah, it looks, feels, and acts just like the original.

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, or a whole lot more money to swap them both at the same time. To do this, we'll hook the idler arm bracket into the vice and we'll slide the idler arm right onto the bracket. Put the nut on there. This happens to be a 24-millimeter. Depending on what kind of part you have in your car, it may vary. The size may vary a little bit.

At this point, we can tighten this up. We started tightening the nut, and we found that the whole thing was spinning, like you can see here. That's why they put a hex on the 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 21-millimeter socket and extension and place it on the upper bolt and put a wrench on the backside. Of course, we want to turn the ratchet in the proper direction, and we'll start tightening up that bolt. All right, then we'll go for the lower one, which again 21-millimeter with a ratchet and extension and 21-millimeter on the back.

Now we have the 21-millimeter 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. Now you can slide the cotter pin through the hole and bend it over so that it stays in place. Now you'll see that when we move the wheels back and forth, the play between the idler arm and the steering bracket no longer exists.

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You want to keep in mind when you're doing this job after you're done, you're going to want to go to a local garage and have the vehicle aligned so you don't have premature tire wear. Take the center cap off. I'll just use a straight blade screwdriver, just get behind here, slide it off. Take the lug nuts off. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Gonna take the wheel off. [inaudible 00:00:34] off this jam nut. I'm going to use a 7/8 wrench. And just take some rust penetrant, this thing is a little bit rusty so let that soak a little bit. Gonna take a 18-millimeter socket, take this nut off. And take a hammer and just hit the bottom of the tie rod to release it from the knuckle. Just like that.

Now when I take off the tie rod, just count how many turns you have. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7...21, 22 and write that number down. Now I'm going to take a large adjustable wrench and loosen up the inner tie rod end. And loosen this up and just slide it off. Take a little thread locker, put it on the threads before you put the new one on and line it up. And then use my adjustable wrench to tighten this up. If you have the ability to use a torque wrench and torque this, you want to torque this to 74 foot-pounds. And take the outer tie rod, one, two, and then count the turns that you counted before. Three...21, 22. Take the jam nut not off...I mean the castle nut off and slide it in the knuckle. Slide the stud part into the knuckle. Put the nut on. Just gonna use a pry bar, pry down on the outer tie rod in to prevent the stud from spinning, and just snug this up a little bit. Use the 18-millimeter socket. And torque this to 37 foot-pounds. And if the hole doesn't line up for the cotter pin, just tighten the castle nut until it lines up. Little more. Should be good. Put the cotter pin through. And take my cutters and just bend this over then just trim the excess.

Tighten up this jam nut. I'm going to use a 13/16 wrench, and if you have the ability to torque it, torque it to 36 foot-pounds. There's a grease fitting right here. Just take a grease gun and give it a couple pumps. And I really give it a couple of pumps until I see the boot move a little bit. And that's good. Put the wheel back on. And the lug nuts. And now I'm gonna torque these lug nuts in a star pattern or cross pattern to 140 foot-pounds to tighten the wheel down evenly. And just go around again, double-check. And put the center cap on.

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 want to come right up front 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 going to 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 going to use a 21-millimeter right there, and then we'll use a 21-millimeter wrench on the nut side.

Right there. 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 the idler arm here, you're going to need to separate it from the idler arm bracket assembly. When you go to do that, you're going to remove this nut right here, and then you're going to have to try to get something in between to try to separate.

You could try to use a puller, and that would probably be helpful if you have that tool. If you don't have the tool, and you try using a pickle fork, you're probably going to damage this right here, in which case, you would replace the pair, which is what we're going to do today. But I'll still show you how to get it apart anyways just in case you're doing only one piece.

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 going to have it so it's facing down towards the left, so when I remove this and it tries to spin, it can't go anywhere. Now, that we have the nut off of there, we need to separate the idler arm from the bracket assembly itself. We want to do that without damaging the bracket assembly because we're going to be reusing it, right?

So if you were to look right up here, you're going to see that there's a hole right inside the center of this. What I would like to do is take a punch. I'm going to put this on something sturdy. You can use something like a piece of wood like I have now, a desk, a vise, anything you want. Just be super careful. Come right in here with your punch and a hammer. Let's see if we can get this to come out.

Okay. So that came out, and we caused no damage to this. Perfect. The next thing I like to do is put the unit right inside of a vise if you have access to one. You want to grab on to 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 going to take that idler arm. Set it right down on there. Take our brand-new nut. You always want to 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 going to notice is the stud on the inside is going to 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 going to use a hex bit, and you want to use an 8-millimeter. Come right inside there. That's going to hold it, and now we'll continue tightening this.

Make sure it's nice and tight. That feels great. Maybe time to get our unit back up inside the vehicle here. Just bring it right up and in behind those lines hopefully. Okay, 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. Put that right through. The other one. There 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. This out of here. Awesome. Let's get this shield back up on here. I'm going to line up those holes. Start in all the bolts before I tighten any of them down. Perfect. The next thing that I would want to do is make sure that I get it down to a reputable alignment shop.

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.

Take this center cap off. We'll just use a straight blade screwdriver. Just get behind here, slide it off. Get the lug nuts off. Use a 22-millimeter socket. Now take the wheel off.

Loosen up this jam nut. I'm gonna use a 7/8 wrench. And just take some rust penetrant, this thing's a little bit rusty. So let that soak a little bit. Now take a 18-millimeter socket. Take this nut off. And take a hammer and just hit the bottom of the tie rod to release it from the knuckle. Just like that. Now I'm gonna take off the tie rod. Just count how many turns you have. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 21, 22. And write that number down. And take the outer tie rod, one, two. And then count the turns that you counted before, 3, 21, 22. Take the jam nut off. I mean, the castle nut off. And slide it in the knuckle. Slide the stud part into the knuckle. Put the nut on. Just gonna use a pry bar. Pry down on the outer tie rod end to prevent the stud from spinning. And just snug this up a little bit. It's the 18-millimeter socket. And torque this to 37-foot-pounds. And if the hole doesn't line up for the cotter pin, just tighten the castle nut until it lines up. Little more. Should be good. Put the cotter pin through. And take my cutters and just bend this over. And just trim the excess. Tighten up this jam nut. I'm gonna use a 13/16 wrench. And if you have the ability to torque it, torque it to 36-foot-pounds.

Put the wheel on. And the lug nuts. And now I'm gonna torque these lug nuts in a star pattern or cross pattern to 140-foot-pounds to tighten the wheel down evenly. And just go around again. Double-check. And put the center cap on.

I'm going to use a 22-millimeter socket to take off the lug nuts so we can remove the wheel, then I remove the wheel. So I'm going to use some pliers at the top of the sway bar link right there, and then underneath, I'm gonna use a 14-millimeter socket and just take the link out. A long bolt goes straight through just like that. And take the top off just like that. Now just take a pry bar underneath here. Just raise up on the sway bar, take the link out, all right. So we'll just take the new link apart, and just leave the washer and the bushing on this long bolt. And take the other bushing and the washer, line that up first.

And then this tube goes next. Slide that bolt through, and then another washer and the bushing. Align this up and slide the bushing and the washer. Pry down on the bar. And then it would help if you had someone to help you out to pry this while you're holding this and getting the nuts started. All right, that's good. And then use a 14-millimeter wrench for the nut and a 14-millimeter socket and tighten this down. And then you want to torque this to 89 inch-pounds. Make sure you're on inch-pounds, not foot-pounds. Now, put the tire back and lug nuts. Now we're gonna torque the lug nuts to 140 foot-pounds in a star pattern or a cross pattern so that it tightens the wheel down evenly. And just go around again. Double Check.

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.

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.

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.

Disconnect the battery. Disconnect the negative terminal. Use an 8-millimeter wrench. Disconnect that, just slide it out of the way.

You wanna make sure the steering wheel is centered, and you want to lock the steering wheel somehow. What you can do is take the seat belt and just go through the steering wheel and then buckle the seat belt. That way, it'll keep the steering wheel from turning.

All right, take the wheel off. We wanna remove the hubcap. Use a straight-blade screwdriver, slide that off. Use a 22-millimeter socket, take the lug nuts off. Remove the wheel.

I'm gonna take this panel off, use a 15-millimeter socket, take these bolts out. There's four bolts. Slide that down.

Take this cotter pin off. Just use some side cutters. Now, remove this nut. Use a 21-millimeter socket. So, now you can try to use different types of tools to separate this. I'm just gonna use a puller. You can try something like this or you can try something like a pickle fork to try to get it in there.

I'm gonna try to use a pickle fork now. Here we go. We're gonna pull this power steering hose off the steering box right here. You may have a clamp that's holding it on, this one happens to have a worm clamp. Use a 7-millimeter socket. If you have the regular style clamp, just use some pliers. You might wanna put a drain bucket underneath because you're gonna lose some fluid. Take that off.

Now I wanna take this steering line off, use an 18-millimeter wrench. It's not easy to get in there with a wrench. If you have a crows foot, that would work a little better. But just do the best you can.

So, our line is rusted at the top of the steering box and it's not breaking free. In our situation, I'm gonna have to take it off the brake booster. I'm gonna use a 16-millimeter wrench and loosen this up. But, ideally, if you can get it off the top of the box, steering box, then that would be ideal. And I can slide this line out from here. Now I'll just take this line out with the steering box. Just like that. And then, on the top of the steering box, we need to take the linkage that connects this to the lower steering column. There's an 11-millimeter bolt, take that out. Pull that bolt out. It's a good idea to replace this bolt whenever you take it out.

Let's just take a pry bar, get in between the lower steering shaft and your steering box and just pry it up to try to separate the two.

So, I'm gonna try to get this off the rest of the way from underneath. Take your pry bar, try to get in between that groove right there. Just try to hammer it up. All right, that's popped off. It's good.

Now we need to take these three bolts out. There's one behind the shields right there. Use a 21-millimeter socket. Take these out. All right, I'm gonna take the last one out. Just loosen those so they're loose like that.

[inaudible 00:04:53] steering box, just lift it up because you gotta pull that pitman arm out. Twist it sideways so we still have that line connected. And here we go.

Now I'm gonna use a 34-millimeter socket to take this nut off. Take that off. Now this is a dust seal right here. Just get a straight-blade screwdriver and just push it up. Just get that out of the way so we can put our tool on and put the pitman-arm remover on. Here we go.

Now there is four key ways for this to line up. So, install this the same way that the old one came off. Put the lock washer on, put the nut on, and tighten this up. And then do the best you can, put this in a vise and then torque this nut to 180 foot-pounds.

And then slide this dust boot back down. Just like that. Looks good.

Now I'm gonna send the hose up first. You know, if you were able to not have to have the hose connected, then you don't have to do this part. And slide the box in position. You wanna get the pitman arm through that steering bar...just like that. Make sure that's lined up first. Move this around a little bit and get one of these bolts started. And you can try to get the other one started as well. I'm gonna have to rotate this a little bit.

Now I'm gonna torque these bolts to 110 foot-pounds. Now put this nut on. And we're gonna torque this nut to 46 foot-pounds.

Now if the hole's not lined up for the cotter pin, you can tighten the nut a little bit more. It's better to tighten it than loosen it. And that looks good. A little more. Put the cotter pin in. Take some side cutters and just bend it...just like this. And trim the excess.

So, you just wanna make sure that the steering box, the wheels are straight just like it was when you took this shaft off. And just get this lined up. You can get it started while you're underneath. Or you can try to do it from up top.

All right, let's slide the steering shaft onto the box, or the gear. That's lined up. Now you put that bolt in. And do the best you can with torquing this, it might be a little bit better to torque this from underneath. You could get directly on it. You wanna torque that bolt to 37 foot-pounds. Okay, good.

Now I'm gonna run this hose back the way it came, up to the booster. And if you didn't take it off here, connect that hose down below.

All right, now snug this up. Now, if you have the ability to use a torque wrench, you can torque this nut, or the lower nut, on the steering box, to 20 foot-pounds. That's good.

Now install this hose. It goes to the cooler. And tighten this up, if you have a worm clamp, or use the hose clamp pliers. And just snug it up. And this cover, bolt's in. And tighten thee bolts down.

Now let's reconnect the battery. Give it a wiggle, make sure it's tight, and you're good to go.

Now we're gonna top off the fluid, take the cap off of the power steering pump. And then use a funnel, and check your owners manual, put in the appropriate fluid.

All right, so, I over filled this a little bit, which is okay. Now, with the front wheels off the ground and the cap off, you might still wanna put a bucket underneath. I'm gonna turn the wheel back and forth about 20 times. Slowly.

All right, we're gonna double check our fluid level. I haven't started the vehicle yet. And the fluid level's right there. Before I just suck some of the fluid out of there, I'm actually gonna start the vehicle, turn the wheel back and forth a couple times, and then recheck it and adjust accordingly.

Install the tire. Put the lug nuts on. All right, tighten these lug nuts down. I'm going to tighten them in a star pattern, or a cross pattern, to 140 foot-pounds to tighten the wheel down evenly. I'm just go around again, double-check. Take the center cap.

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Hi, I'm Don from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

In this video, we're going to show how to replace an outer tie rod on this 2002 Chevy Suburban, and it's the same part and similar process on these Suburbans from 2001 to 2006. We show you on the passenger side, but the driver side is the same procedure. The items you'll need for this are a new outer tie rod from 1AAuto.com; 7mm, 13mm, 18mm and 22mm socket and ratchet; flat-blade screwdriver; adjustable wrench; tape measure; pliers; hammer; and a grease gun.

You want to just loosen up these 22mm caps, and then pull the hubcap free. Then, you want to loosen these lug nuts while the vehicle is on the ground, then raise the vehicle and remove them the rest of the way, unless you have air-powered tools. Then, you can do it while it's in the air.

Now you want to measure from the boot on your inner tie rod to the edge of your outer tie rod and just remember that measurement. Now, using your adjustable wrench, loosen up this nut right here, and then you want to remove this 18mm nut down here. Now just hit on your knuckle with a hammer and this is going to break up that outer tie rod and make it easier to pull out. Now just hold this nut with the adjustable wrench, pull the outer tie rod off and just twist it until it comes free. We'll fast forward as Don does this. You want to make sure that the inner tie rod doesn't spin while you're removing the outer tie rod.

Now, put the grease fitting into your new outer tie rod and just tighten that 7mm grease fitting up. Then twist the outer tie rod back onto your inner tie rod and push it down into place. Now, replace the castle nut and just tighten that up. Then push the cotter pin through and, using your pliers, just bend the ends of it. Now, using your grease gun, fill the tie rod with grease. Measure, and you should get about the same distance. That's a good preliminary alignment. You should have your car aligned after this. Tighten up the lock nut to hold it in place.

Now replace your wheel and then replace those lug nuts and tighten them preliminarily. Lower the vehicle and tighten them the rest of the way. Now torque the lug nuts in a crossing pattern to 100 foot-pounds. Replace the hubcap and tighten up those caps.

We hope this video 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.