How to Remove Steering Angle Sensor 2010-14 Subaru Outback

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on a 2013 Subaru Outback. I want to show you how to remove and replace a steering angle sensor. It's going to be fairly simple, I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so one of the first things you want to do is want to make sure that your steering wheel's going straight. The way that we're going to do that is we're going to start the vehicle, we're going to go forward a couple feet, make sure the steering wheel's straight, we're going to reverse a couple feet, still making sure the vehicle's straight. Then we're going to park it, make sure the steering wheel's straight. Turn off the key, and then we'll proceed to our next step. All right, steering wheel's pretty straight. Okay, so we know the wheels are straight, the steering wheel's straight. Keys out. We'll set that aside. Emergency brake's on. All right, we'll move to the next step and that's disconnecting the negative battery terminal. Be careful for your steering wheel.

We're going to remove the negative battery terminal. To do that, I'm using a 10 millimeter. The reason why I'm removing the negative and not the positive is because if I was doing this with the positive and I touched it on something metal, it would arc out and it could cause issues for my computer and the car and/or cause arcing and sparking. I'm just going to set that aside. This is disconnected. Now we're going to wait two minutes before we proceed to the next procedure.

Okay, so along the side of your steering wheel, you've got a hole right here. You've got a hole on the exact opposite side of the steering wheel over on the passenger side of it. Then directly under the center, you have a very similar hole. Inside those holes, there's these little almost like a clip that holds your horn pad in. We need to get our little tool up inside there, move those clips out of the way so it releases the horn pad from the vehicle. We've already disconnected the battery. We know we did that. If you have not disconnected the battery, you need to go back and disconnect the battery and wait two full minutes. I'm going to continue. I'm going to grab my pick. I'm going to get under here and I'm going to see if I can get this clip undone.

Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to put the key in the ignition just to the point that we can turn the wheel. Right now it's in the locked position. Okay, now it's unlocked. I can see the hole right here. Inside this hole, there's a little clip. I'm going to try to find that clip, release the clip and pull out on this. Then I'm going to do the same to the lower hole, and then the one that's on the complete opposite side of the steering wheel. I'm going to release the horn pad. I'm not going to pull it out very far, I just want it to be released at that point. Then we'll move onto the next step.

Okay, I got one. There we are. Okay. We've got this loose. Just going to set it back in just like that. Getting my steering wheel as close to straight as I can. Okay, so we've got our horn pad here, airbag and everything. I just want to show you what we were dealing with when we were coming up through the holes in the sides. We were dealing with these clips right here, and what you have to do is you have to get your tool in, you can see the tip of it right there, and then just kind of pry this over. Then when you pry that over, it releases this right here. Well, obviously it would be that side but this is closer to me. It releases this right here. You got to do all that for all three. That little clip just goes around this and holds it in. It's real difficult to get into, especially when you can't see, but that's essentially what you need to do. Go in through the hole, put your little pick in there and then just slide that right off to the side. Id' say easy peasy but not so much.

Okay, this has been disconnected for several minutes now. What we want to do is we want to grab this little yellow thing, just try to pull it up just like that. You're just going to grab it, lift it right up. The orange wire goes to the orange. We'll do the same to the black. Go right under the yellow, lift up on that, grab it, lift it. Easy peasy. To disconnect this, just going to grab right here, I'm just going to try to pull this off, hopefully. Here we are. All right, let's move along to the next step.

Okay, so I'm just going to use a marker at this point. I'm going to mark the shaft and the steering wheel itself, all right? Like that, straight up and down. Just try to line up these lines as straight as possible. This is just so hopefully I have the best chance possible of getting my steering wheel back on straight. Just do the best you can. Take your time. If for some reason you do something and you wipe off your marks, you're going to be hurting, so just do it right first time. Here we are. That should be pretty visible for awhile. Now I'm going to take off this center nut right here, and we'll move onto the next step.

Okay, we're going to use our 17 millimeter socket and we're going to remove this. You can use a ratchet, you can use an airgun, whatever you want to do. Just try to hold your steering wheel, give it a loving bonk, take that nut right out of here. We'll set this aside. Okay, generally speaking, on most imports you can take your steering wheel, you can give it a little shake and it should want to slide off. Once it starts sliding off, we're going to stop at that point. Just wiggle it, yep. There we are. Okay, so we know that's coming off. Just going to feel around. Here's our wiring. I'm going to pull that through, just like this. I'm going to disconnect this right here. Now we've removed our steering wheel.

We're going to remove these two Phillips head screws. You can start with the left or the right. That's what our screw looks like. Okay, we'll set this aside. Grab the other one. Mm-hmm (affirmative), screw number two. Exact same as the first. Put both of those together so we know where to find them. All right, now we can grab this, separate right there. Bring my steering column down a little bit. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to separate the top from the bottom. Here we are. Just pull this out of here a little bit. I guess I'm going to leave that right there. It doesn't want to come out too much further so I don't want to force it. Now I'm going to remove the lower portion. That comes right off. We'll set this aside. Okay, now we have a clear view of what's going on. Let's move onto the next step.

I'm going to remove the electrical connectors first. Use my thumb, push up on the center tab right here. Okay, do the same thing for this one. Let me see if I can find the center tab. Can't use my thumb on that one, so I'm going to try this because I have it close to me. I'm just going to push up on the center tab. See if I can get this to release. The way that this releases, I just grabbed it and I pushed it like that. Although it looks like you're supposed to push on this part right here, what you actually do is you grab right here and slide it and it releases the lock, okay? Let's move ahead to the next step.

All right, so right here there's a little tab. You just want to pull down on that. Just try to give this a little bit of a tug. You don't want to go too far. It's still clipped in. Got this one up here, and then directly across from over there, there's one on this side. I'm just going to do this one as well. Here we are. Got one more connector under here. Okay, now we've removed our roll pin, clock spring, and steering angle sensor assembly.

Okay, so to separate the two of these, you want to make sure that you have your wiring unit back up at the top, that's where it started when you originally started, and the rest of the wiring harness stuff was down at the bottom, so they're exact opposite. You want to pay attention to in here. You have a gray area that sits inside the black area, and you'll see what I mean in one second when I go to separate this why that's important. I'm just going to go right here. There's a little clip. I'm going to go right in between, at least that's my plan. Should go in there. There we are. Okay, so it's starting to lift up. I'll come over here, lift up on that one. As I lift, the gray pieces are lifting, okay? Like I said, pay special attention to where this is, don't let it rotate around because you want to make sure that this gray sits in the top of your new connector or clock spring. Okay, almost there. Homestretch. Come on, baby. There we are. We have our clock spring assembly or roll pin assembly, roll connector assembly I should say, and right here we have our steering angle sensor.

All right, so now what we're going to do, we're just going to slide the steering angle sensor over the roll pin/clock spring assembly and lock it in. There we are. We're locked and loaded. Looking good. All right, let's move to the next step, which is the install. Okay friends, here we go. Time for the install. Make sure you pay special attention to not pull this yet. The reason for this right here is to make sure that your clock spring/roll connector cannot spin around and around and around and around. It can only go around five turns, go any more than that, you're going to cause damage, okay? Leave that in until we're ready to take it out, which will be further on down the line.

What I'm going to do now, I'm going to start connecting all my connectors here. Why not? Just connect them in one at a time. You pick which order you want to do them in. I won't judge you. Just do it the way I do it, makes the most sense that way. All right, slide this up over here. Now we're going to bring it in. We've got our little hooky do there, one over there, one over here, one over here. Make sure they're all lined up. I'm not going to push on this part, I'm going to go right onto where the connector's going to go. Slide it in, in, in. Give it a little wiggle, it's definitely not going to come off on its own. You want to make sure that it's locked in, okay? You don't want this coming off when everything's already back together. That's going to be a whole lot of hassle and I don't want to deal with it, and I don't want you to have to deal with it. We know we're in. It's going nowhere. We can move ahead to the next step.

Okay, so it's time to install our lower column. The way to do that is you want to make sure you have this arm come up through this hole right here and then out through the bottom. Just kind of line it up, you can bring it up if you need to. Get your plastic in to where it belongs, which is down along inside this bay underneath the dash, bring it up and over. That's looking pretty good. We'll get our upper area lined up. Just goes right in here first. Just like that. Now we're going to bring the lower area up to match. It should all want to clip in as soon as I get it lined up. Okay, looking pretty good. Up along the top. Okay, we're clipped in going along here. Looks good on this side. You're going to have to trust me. We're going to put in our Phillips head screws. Feels like it bottomed out. Teeny bit. This one. Bottomed out, just a teeny bit. Okay, this feels pretty great. I'm going to lock it in so it can't wobble around on me. Now we can move ahead to the next step.

All right, now that we have all this mounted, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this pin right here, all right? This is going to make it so this can spin, so you want to make sure that you go ahead and grab on it and spin it all around. Right now it's locked in, it's safe. If you take it out and you spin this around even if it's just one time, you're messing around, you're doing whatever you want to do, maybe your kid's in here. I don't know, it spins around. You put it all together, it seems like it's good to go. You go to take a turn driving down the road, now you brought it to its max, you're going to break your clock spring. It's going to cost you more money. You're going to watch a video on how to do it again.

I'm going to take this. Just going to give it a little tug, pull that out. Like I said, now this can spin. I didn't bring it very far. I just wanted to show you that now it can move. I'm going to keep it straight up and down. Now we can move ahead to the next step.

We're going to get our steering wheel ready. We've got it marked. We want to line up our markings with this as we go on. I'm just going to take these, they're right up along the top so we're going to put them through along the top hole there. Being very careful not to spin our clock spring. If it moves a little bit, that's okay. I'm not going to get mad at you, but you want to make sure that you don't spin it around. Okay, so we've got that. I'll put this up in here just like that. It's clipped in. Pull my wires with me here. Okay, as we go now, we want to make sure that all your wires are coming through the steering wheel hole and you're lining up your steering shaft with the lines that you made on the steering wheel. I'm going to take a look at it. Looks like maybe I'm going to come off and I'm going to go one, two. Okay. That looks pretty good. All right, now we can move ahead to the next step.

I'll just tuck these up and out of the way for a second here. I'm going to take my nut, put it on here. There we are. Okay, I'm going to hold the steering wheel, I'm going to tighten down this nut. Okay, right now it's bottomed out, so I'm holding my steering wheel, give it a teeny bit more, all my lines are lined up perfectly. Looks like I'm going all right.

Okay, so now it's time to connect in our airbag/horn pad. You can start with whichever wire you want. This is the ground wire for the horn, makes it go beep beep. Black to black. The connectors go facing down. We're just going to hold the sides, slide it in and then push in the center, locked. Try to make sure that the centers are lifted up by the way. Go along the side, push it in, and then push in the locking center. Okay, give them a gentle tug. Nothing's coming apart. Very nice. We're going to take our horn pad or airbag, we're going to go ahead and gently press it in. There we are. Perfect. All right, let's connect the battery and we'll move onto the next step.

Okay, we'll grab our battery cable. Battery, when you go to connect these, it might arc or spark. If it does, don't let it scare you, just keep on going, okay? Don't put it on arc, spark, lift it up, on arc, spark, lift it up. One and done, okay? Just go for it. Little spark. I'm going to tighten this up. My 10 millimeter. Nice and tight. Okay.

Okay, so let's try the horn. Sounds good. That's a HELLA horn. We're going to start up the vehicle, just give it one second. Make sure we don't have any lights on here. No airbag light or anything like that. Got my seatbelt light, my seatbelt's not on. Couple of lights, no airbag light. Looks like I'm doing all right. There we are. Easy peasy.

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