2004 GMC Savana 2500 Van Rear Wheel Drive 8600LB GVW with 4 Groove Pitman Arm Front 12 Piece Steering & Suspension Kit TRQ PSA52358

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.