Chevrolet Camaro Front Driver Side Control Arm with Ball Joint TRQ PSA84296

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In this video, we're going to be working on our 2011 Chevy Camaro. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your vehicle's front lower forward control arm. If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you need this part for your car, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.

Using a 22 millimeter socket and a breaker bar, we'll loosen all of our lug nuts. Raise and support your vehicle. We're doing this on the lift to make it easier to show you what's going on, but this can easily been done at home on a jack and jack stands. With the tire off the ground, go ahead and finish removing your lug nuts and the wheel and tire assembly.

This is the passenger side forward lower control arm. To remove this, we'll start by loosening this 21 mm nut. We'll use a breaker bar to start it, then a socket and ratchet to finish removing it. For now, we're just going to leave that flush with the end of the bolt.

There are a few different ways to remove the ball joint. You could use a ball joint separating fork or pickle fork, which tends to destroy the boot. If you're removing this and intending to reuse it, you'll want to either hit the side of the control arm here to shock it loose and pop the ball joint out, or since we set the nut flush with the end of the bolt, we can hit the end here and not worry about damaging our threads or mushrooming the head of our bolt.

On the subframe side, we'll use a 21 mm wrench to secure the nut on the lower control arm bushing, and a 21 mm socket and a breaker bar on the front to loosen it. Once we get it loose, we'll finish removing that with a ratchet. Hold the control arm, remove the bolt, remove your control arm from the vehicle.

Here we have our old front lower forward control arm that we removed from our vehicle and our new part from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, these parts are exactly the same. We have a nice new bushing in here, the same body of the control arm, and the ball joint which is actually one piece with this. The ball joints on this vehicle cannot be changed separately. They are a part of the arm. Your two major fail points that you're going to have on these are the rubber bushings which you can see are starting to separate just a little on the back here. This isn't awful. The ball joint itself can go bad and create some unnecessary or unwanted up and down play as well as a lot of alignment issues, as can the bushing. These parts are exactly the same. Our new one from 1A Auto are going to go in direct fit just like our original equipment. Whether we have a bad bushing or a bad ball joint this part is going to fix us up right.

Reinstall the control arm. You'll want to line up the bushing first and send that bolt through. It may take a little bit of wiggling to get that to line up. We'll then line up the ball joint. Pull that through and start the new nut onto there. Tighten that down with a 21 mm socket and ratchet. If you hold it toward you to keep that tapered fit into the control arm, you should be able to tighten down without the stud spinning. Ours is turning a little bit, so we'll hold the stud with our 10 mm wrench and tighten the nut with our 21 mm. Some people will use a 10 mm socket and ratchet or 10 mm socket and an impact tool to spin this counterclockwise while holding the nut. I don't recommend doing that because you're just putting unnecessary strain and wear on the ball and socket joint by rotating it. It's probably not going to destroy it the first time, but for a few extra minutes of work here, we're really going to help the longevity of our new part. Torque the ball joint nut to 30 foot pounds. We'll now use an angle finder to add 90 degrees to this torque. Now 90 degrees is something that you can eyeball fairly easily, but for the most precise tension, be sure to use an angle gauge.

We'll get the 21 mm nut started on the backside. Hold that with our wrench and then tighten this bolt down. But we are not going to tighten it up all the way. We're just going to get it close, and then we'll load up our suspension to ride height and torque it at that point.

We're going to use a screw jack because our vehicle's on a lift, but you could do this same process using a floor jack at home. We're just going to compress the vehicle suspension by lifting up on the bottom of the hub simulating weight of the vehicle on the wheel. Once we're at that ride height position, we can torque our bolt and not preload the bushing. Torque the bolt first to 37 foot pounds. We'll then set up our torque angle finder and torque to 120 degrees. You can now remove the load from your suspension.

Reinstall your wheel and tire, and get all five of your lug nuts on as tight as you can by hand. You may also use a 22 millimeter socket to help you spin these in. Lower your vehicle back onto its wheels. You can now torque your lug nuts to 140 foot-pounds in a cross pattern.

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