Chevrolet GMC Cadillac Front CV Axle Assembly TRQ CSA82121

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In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the right hand, or passenger side, front axle on this 2011 Chevy Silverado. This is a 1500. The procedure for the left axle is pretty much the same, and it's also the same for these trucks for model years 2007-2013 for both this Chevy Silverado 1500, as well as the GMC Sierra. In this repair we use new axle or axles from 1AAuto.com, jack and jack stands, 15 to 22mm sockets with a ratchet extension. You'll need a breaker bar and a pipe for some extra leverage, a 36mm socket, and I separate that one out because it's not one that's usually in your regular socket set. You'll need to buy that one special, some penetrating oil, and a torque wrench. You can replace these axles one at a time, or in pairs.

From the top, there are three 18mm nuts that hold the top of the strut in place. You see one there, one has a wire lube on it there that I'm going to reach down and grab and just pull off. Apologies for the camera shot, but you just grab the wire clip and pull it up off the stud. Okay, so you have your other one there and your third one there. Now use an 18mm socket with a long extension and remove those three nuts. Remove the center cap just by prying with a screw driver. If you don't have the benefit of air tools, loosen the lug nuts with the vehicle on the ground then raise and secure the vehicle and then remove the lug nuts the rest of the way. Remove the wheel and tire they are 22mm lug nuts.

Turn the wheel using hands or the steering wheel. Then you need to remove the stabilizer link. Make sure you put some penetrating oil on the top end of it there. Then use a wrench on the top side and a socket wrench on the bottom side. Remove it all the way. We're going to kind of speed up a little bit, "cheat" a little bit while using an impact wrench to take that off to speed things up for us. Here's the shock and strut in place. We're just using that 15mm socket ratchet. You might want a breaker bar to break them loose, but they come apart pretty easy on this truck. We'll fast-forward as we just take those out.

Get those bolts out. Press down on the suspension some, and bring the strut down and then up and out. Using your hammer and a cold chisel, you could also use a large pair of pliers to pull off that center cap. We just kind of get it started, and then pry it off with a screwdriver. Okay, the nut is a 36mm nut if you have the benefit of an air impact wrench. You can also just pull the brakes, use a breaker bar and a large pipe or something for extra leverage to loosen it up. We'll put the wheel back on, set the emergency brake, and take it off. Loosen it up that way, and then raise the vehicle back up and take it off the rest of the way.

We're going to put a screwdriver into the brake rotor, that's going to hold things in place. You could do that also when you're removing that 36mm nut for the end of the axle. Then there are six 15mm bolts that hold the axle to the differential, and we're just going to remove those. And once those bolts are out, pull the axle from the differential and pull it right out.

The new axle goes right up into place. Put it into the hub first, you have to twist it a little bit to get the splines to line up. Then push on the other end of the axle and put it up into place. Line it up with the differential. Now I'll just fast-forward here as we put the bolts in, start all the bolts in, and then tighten them up preliminarily. And then you want to tighten all the bolts to between 55 and 60 foot-pounds. We'll fast-forward as we make sure we torque all those bolts correctly. And we're using the screwdriver to hold the rotor in place so we can torque it.

Now we'll go back to putting the strut in, and the strut does line up. There is a, you can see where the spring goes into the mount. The end of the spring should face out. Put the strut up in place and start the bolts on. You'll notice we're putting in a new strut in here. You'll also probably notice that there's an old axle in the footage, that's because when we filmed putting the strut and everything back together, we had not replaced the axle yet.

Now put the bottom down in place and take your bolt run up through, and then those clips that you took off of the original strut, put them into place. We just kind of hold them with our fingers, get the bolts started in, and then you can press them down into place and tighten up the bolts the rest of the way. Okay, and you can see here we use a screwdriver to put through the clip to hold it in place until it gets down far enough that it holds itself in place. And repeat it for the other side as well. Okay, and you can tighten these up between 70-75 foot-pounds.

Okay, speed up as we put the stabilizer link back in place. Use a pry bar to lift up on the sway bar a little bit, put the link back in place, put the bolt up through and then tighten the nut down on top. Put the tire back on, thread the lug nuts on, and then tighten them up preliminarily. Put that center bolt back on and tighten it to 156 foot-pounds. Torque your lug nuts to 110 foot-pounds using a crossing pattern. And then put that center cap back on. And then back up top, tighten up the three nuts that hold the top of the strut in place, tighten them to 70 foot-pounds. And put that wire retainer back in place and you're 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. 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's 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 going to come right up along here and you're going to 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 going to 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 going to do is remove the nut that holds the upper ball joint to the knuckle. Okay. That comes right off. I'm just going to 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 want to 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 up on 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 going to 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 pushed down on this. Remove that nut. And carefully draw this down. Now, if you're worried the knuckle with the 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 going to 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 we're going to do is remove the bolts that hold the axle to the front differential. That's what the bolts look like. Remove them all. The next thing that we're going to have to do is remove the sway bar link. And you're going to have to do that on both sides of the vehicle. The reason for that is because we want to take the sway bar and swing it down.

There we are, friends. Now, it's going to be time for the install. Take your axle, slide it right in here. Gonna take one of my bolts. I like to use some red threadlocker. We'll call it your prerogative. Go ahead and start in the bolts. Don't tighten any of them down completely until you've started them all in. Okay. Let's snug them up. Like to go criss-cross. All right. Just double-check them all.

Now, it's gonna be time to install your sway bar link. To do that, you want to make sure you have the shaft facing up like this with one of your washers, a bushing with a little piton facing up towards the control arm. I'm going to put it through the lower control arm. Put another bushing with the piton facing down towards the control arm. Nice metal washer. Gonna put my spacer, another metal washer, another rubber bushing with the piton facing up towards the sway bar, just like this. Go ahead and pull this down. Rubber bushing with the piton facing the control arm or the sway bar, washer, and then the nut. Start in the other side the same way. So, now, we're just going to tighten this up. It's important to remember that you don't need to flatten out your bushings. You just kind of want to make them so they're completely touching up against the sway bar and completely touching the control arm itself. I can see it's touching. This can't move around. And I have approximately the width of my pinky. Do the same to the other side of the vehicle.

Let's just take some copper never-seize and go right along this splined area. You don't necessarily need to go down the threaded area though. Go ahead and take your knuckle. I'm going to start it on the axle a little bit and 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 gonna use a bar. We're gonna pull this upper ball joint down into here. Get the nut, go ahead and start it on there. Just gonna 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. Beep. 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 going to line up those bolt holes. I like to use some red threadlocker on these bolts. Start them in there. Okay. Let's bottom them out. Now, let's go ahead and torque these to 148 foot-pounds. Now, we'll just go ahead and take that tie rod end, put it right through the knuckle. Take your nut, start it on there. We're going to bottom it out. Now, you're going to torque this to 44 foot-pounds. That's torqued. The next thing we're going to 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 going to 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 resecured. 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. We'll 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 and in. 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 criss-cross. Torqued. Now, it's going to 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. This can 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.