How to Replace Front CV Axle 2003-09 Toyota 4Runner

Hey friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on our 2006 Toyota 4Runner and I want to show you how to remove and install a front axle. If you need this or any other part, check us out, 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, friends, so it's time to remove our wheel. To do that, you're going to remove all of your lug nuts. You're going to use a 21 millimeter socket. If you're going to be using a ratchet, it might be easier to do this while the wheel's still on the ground so it can't spin while you try to loosen up your lug nuts. I'm using an air gun, so I've got my eye protection, my hand protection. Here we go.

This one I'm going to leave on a few threads. Now I have a spare hand. I'm going to try to wiggle this around. A lot of times on Toyotas, they don't want to break free right away. That's not really that big of a deal. You could use something as simple as a rubber mallet or if you have a pry bar. Either way, what you want to do is make sure you have a lug nut on at least a couple threads, but it's still nice and loose. Come right under here. I'm going to bonk right on the edge of the rim. If you're using a real hammer that's not a rubber mallet, definitely don't hit your rim. You'll mar it up, cause issues. You could try bonking on the tire. You just have to be careful because when you bonk it's going to want to come back. Rubber mallet right on the rim. There we are, that lug nut did its job, made it so the wheel didn't come falling off and hurt anybody. Super important. Safety's number one. Take our wheel off, and we'll roll it out of the way.

All right, so we're going to take out this clip right here. Just a little forky looking clip does this, it goes right over the line. Can use a screwdriver, small pry bar, some cutters if that's easier for you to grab with or even pliers. Once you get it so it wants to break free, should be able to wiggle it right out of there. And that's what it looks like. It's got a little ear here, and that ear faces towards you or away from the vehicle.

Okay, so now it's time to take out these caliper slider pins here. Sometimes they'll be frozen in there if your caliper's old, and that's pretty common. But basically what you need to do is grab like this with your small pocket screwdriver, you're going to take off this clip right here. And do the same thing to the other one. Pull off that clip. It's the same as the first. You don't have to worry about mixing them up. Awesome. Now what you would need to do, just take your small hammer, give these a couple of bonks.

These ones come out nice and easy because it's a brand new caliper, but if it wasn't and they didn't come out easy, you just use your hammer, bonk, bonk, bonk, until it's level. Take your punch, drive these all the way through as far as you can, and then come from this side and pull your pin all the way out. You'd want to inspect your pins, make sure that they're not rotted or rusted or anything like that. If they are, you'd want to replace them so they look something like this. Nice and smooth because your pad needs to be able to slide around on them nice and easily. We'll set those aside.

We've got a little clip up here. This comes out very easily. Just got a little ear right there and it slides into the hole on the pad. And then same thing over here. At this point, if this wasn't a brand new caliper, your pistons are going to be holding your pads probably up against your rotor. We'll go with the assumption that they are. You would take your small pry bar, just come right between the rotor and the pad and just try to push like this and that's going to slowly push in this piston. Same right here, over here and over there. Once you have it so your pistons are pushed back and your pads are plenty of distance away from your rotor, you can grab your pad, slide it right out of there.

We'll set that aside for recycling. This one. Now you're going to want to make sure you have maybe something like this or even a small bungee cord, whatever you need, because we're going to be taking out the two mounting bolts that hold this caliper to the knuckle and we're going to have to hang this somewhere, so just get it ready. Wherever you think you can probably put it. We're going to take out those two bolts and we can continue. Now I'm going to use a 17 millimeter socket. This one's just a swivel and it's on my impact wrench and that's just so when I come in I can get the right angle. You can use a 17 millimeter socket and a long ratchet if that's easier for you. Of course. If you're using your air gun, you want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses at all times.

Got both of our bolts set these aside. Just grab this, bring it down here. Should be able to move around fairly decently. Just going to put that there. There's no pressure on this flex hose. You definitely don't want to put a tug on your flex hose. When you're trying to take the rotor off, you'd want to have a lug nut on there, at least a few good threads, and then when you're taking your hammer and you're going bonk, bonk, bonk to try and get this to break free, if the rotor did decide to pop off, it can't come down and potentially hurt you anywhere. This rotor's already broken free. Here's our rotor.

Okay friends, so we got a little punch, we've got our hammer, you've got your cover. All we're going to do is just make a little divot in the cover just like that and now I'm going to try to drive the cover off. All right, so as you can tell, I did not make a hole inside the cover there, the tin cover. If I did make a hole, I would just have to seal it up. The reason why I had to make that is just so I had something to grab onto so I can knock the cover out. Now we have a clear view of where our axle comes through the wheel bearing and then all the rest of the stuff we're going to have to take off to that axle out.

Now I'm just going to use a pair of cutters, you can grab these ears, can either bend them up and cut them off. I wouldn't cut them unless you have a brand new cotter pin because you can't put this back together without a cotter pin. If for some reason you don't have access to another cotter pin, just straighten out these ears the best you can, then you should be able to get the cotter pin out. We do have access to cotter pins, but I'm just doing it this way just to kind of show you what I'm talking about, about trying to straighten this stuff out. Of course, it'll straighten out more along the way as we do this and at this point I would say that it's fairly reusable. It's not broken in any way. I didn't try to cut into it very much. I just gripped in. Like I said, I'm going to replace it because we have access to new ones, but you definitely need to have one of these to lock this in.

All right, so we're going to use our 36 millimeter socket, I'm going to use my air gun and I'm going to take this off. If you're not using an air gun and you're just using a socket with a ratchet, when you go to turn it to the left to loosen, this is just going to spin. That causes an issue. What you can do, grab yourself a pry bar, put it like this, going across to your lug studs and then bring it down close to the ground so that this is all right down on the ground. As you go to loosen, it's going to bring the pry bar around, rest this on the ground and it's going to hold the bearing from spinning around on you and you'll be able to remove the nut. For me personally, I don't need this because I have this. I have my eye protection on, my hand protection of course. Here we go.

Take that nut off of there. I'm going to put it with the rest of the stuff. Grab this, see if we can push it through. I cannot push this through. This is going to need to come out of the bearing. What we're going to do now, right in the center here, you can see there's a little pilot hole. You can either use a punch with a hammer, bonk, bonk, bonk, try to drive this through, or you can use your little air chisel with a punch that goes in the center. But what you need to make sure that you don't do, use your hammer, give it a couple bonks, if you peen over the threads on your axle, the axle's going to be unusable. You'll have to try to file it down. Hopefully you can get it going good. It's kind of a pain in the butt. Maybe you might even need to replace the whole axle and that will be fairly expensive. If you do do something like that and you need to replace the axle, check out the video. We'll do one on that as well.

I'm going to grab a punch and I'll show you what I'm talking about. I'm just going to use my air chisel with my little punch bit. I got my eye protection on. Here we go. I can see the axle driving its way in. This comes in handy. You can get yourself an air chisel if you want, right off 1AAuto.com. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to take off this cotter pin for your outer tie rod end. Do that. Bend this over. I'm going to grab the cotter pin with some nice cutters. I grabbed cutters instead of pliers because they seem to grab on much better than grabbing a simple pair of pliers. If you have access to new cotter pins, obviously you don't have to worry about trying to save these. If you don't, well then you're going to have to try to save it, which at this point you're past that. We have access to new cotter pins so I'm really not worried, too worried about it, which is a good thing because this one, gonzo bonzo. Cool.

I'm going to use a 17 millimeter socket with an extension and you can use a ratchet or an air gun, whatever you have access to, but it's a 17. We're going to use our 18 millimeter socket, our short extension. I've got my hammer, safety glasses, of course. I'm just going to bonk this down. Get it on there as far as I can. Leave that right like that. Take the socket off in a minute. Next what I'm going to do is I'm going to bonk right on the knuckle itself and try to make enough vibration that the outer tie rod end will break free from the knuckle. Awesome. We'll get the nut out of there as well. If you happen to bonk the backing plate, it's really not that big of a deal. You can bend it fairly easily. Just be careful for any sharp edges.

All right, so now we're going to remove this bolt right here and this bolt right here. To do that, you're going to use a 19 millimeter socket. Awesome. There's one bolt. Bolt number two, same as the first. We'll set both of these aside. You can grab this, you can wiggle it around. Awesome. You can see the reason why we're replacing this axle. That's very bad right there. What you're going to do now is you're going to push your axle through the wheel bearing area here, being careful not to put any tugs on anything, your ABS wires, your brake wire, brake hose, anything like that. Just see if we can pull it out far enough to get the axle out. We're going to go this way. Awesome. Set this off to the side.

Now what we're going to do is we're going to get underneath the vehicle and we're going to try to pry the axle out of here. All right, so now what I'm doing is I'm just trying to create something and it's very basic. All this is set up to do is just to make it so when I knocked the axle out of the differential, it won't be able to fall down. It'll hopefully be caught by this, at least. At least for the couple seconds that it's going to take me to put down my tools, come over here, undo this, and grab the axle right out of here. As a safety precaution just so the axle doesn't come flying out. Now I'm going to take a big old pry bar. I'm going to come through the hole in my skid plate here. I'm going to go right up against one of these lips on the axle. You'll notice that they're all over the place and that's just a good point to put your pry bar onto, give it a try.

Sometimes a few good whacks. Looks like it's starting to come out now. We'll just keep doing what we doing. It's looking good. Awesome. There's that. If you happen to have a rag or something, you can catch your gear oil. Just put that right down under there. At some point it's going to come pouring out. What we'll do is we'll make sure we have our catch bucket under here of course. And then we're just going to take out this rubber plug. I'll grab a pocket screwdriver or something around here see if I can get this to pop out. There it is. Awesome. That's going to give an area for the gear oil to come out into our catch bucket. Did a great job. Thank you. Grab our axle. Of course we got lots of nice grease coming out all over the place and there's our front axle.

All right, so I'm just going to take my rag. I'm going to clean up along the edge of this seal here. There's still going to be some more fluid that comes out. I'm really not worried about that so much as just any type of dirt or debris or anything that I might force in there that could put a tear in that seal. If you notice that your seal was leaking prior to doing the axle, obviously now would be the time to do it. That one looks good so I'm just going to grab my axle.

You've got the side that goes into the transmission, and then of course the side that the wheel bearing is going to be on. Just put this so it's pretty level. I'm going to get this up and in here. Line it up with the splines and the transmission. Awesome. We're going to leave this right here like this. I'm going to grab my rubber mallet and it's important that you use a rubber mallet. You don't want to use a regular hammer if you can avoid it. And if you have to use a regular hammer, I would definitely make sure that you have your nut on here just like this, and have it as level as possible so when you're bonking, you don't have to worry about messing up any of the threads on your axle. Because if you mess up the threads, obviously the nut's not going to want to go on there and you're going to have major issues, hence the rubber mallet. I'll try it with a rubber mallet. All right, here we go.

Looks like it's going in. We're going to keep going until it feels like it bottoms out. Sometimes it can be hard and that's just because of that metal clip that's in there. That's the locking clip. Right now we're trying to get the locking clip to go into its happy spot. Let's just give it a couple more taps here just to be sure. But it looks like we're pretty darn close if not there. Perfect. I love it. I can spin the axle. Feels good. I don't hear any noises. Let's move along.

We'll take off our nut. This comes off nice and easy. We made no damage to the axle or the threads. We can tell because the nut goes on and off no problem. We'll set that nut aside because we're going to be using it in a minute. At this point, you're going to take your knuckle, bring it out, try to slide it over here. If you wanted to, you could use a little bit of a never seize on here. That's completely up to you. I'm going to be putting my hand here to try to maneuver it around so it just kind of seems like it's a bad idea to do it that way. What you could do though, just come from the backside, just give it a couple little sprays so it goes into where the splines are. That's right where this is going to ride. Just need another place to grab onto aside from this terribly crumpling backing plate.

Just going to slide our axle through. Just going to leave it just like this. Nice and far away from here so that way there I can keep in the back of my head that this is not tight yet. I'm not screwing it all the way down. If you want to, you can just leave it completely off that way there if you happen to find it on the ground or wherever you are, you'll be like, oh no, the axle nut. For me personally, I just put it here. And that just prevents this from coming all the way out as I maneuver things around. All right, so let's keep moving.

We're going to line these back up. We're going to put our bolts up through here. We've got our bolts. If you wanted to, you could use a little bit of threadlocker. This is just an instructional video. I'm really not too worried about it, but we'll say that it's your prerogative on if you wanted it to do it or not. You do you Booboo. Sometimes getting these things lined up can test your patience, but if that's the hardest thing I have to do all day, I guess I'm doing all right. All right, got one. Two.

Just make sure you straighten out your backing plate the best you can. If you happen to bend it when you're in the process of moving it around, the axle. This backing plate right here, it looks as though it could use a little bit of help, maybe even replacement. To do that of course you would take off your wheel bearing here. Just a couple of bolts. Take that off, out of the way. Obviously you'd have your axle nut off and then take your bearing off and then here you go. Replace that, put it back on.

Okay, so we have that broken cotter pin in here. I'm just going to go ahead and put my drill bit in here. I've got my safety glasses on, of course, and I'm just going to try to drill out this hole so we can put a new cotter pin through. That looks pretty great. Clean off any metal debris that we might've made so it doesn't get down into this boot area. You can see right through there. Oohoo, take this. We have our castle nut. Snug that up. All right, let's find the torque spec for this real quick. We're going to go to 67 foot pounds. All right, just going to check it one more time.

Okay, so now what we need to do is we need to find where the hole that we made in the tie rod end is, and then line it up with one of the slots on our castle nut. If you find that the slot does not match up with the hole, you need to continue tightening. You don't want to loosen up to get to the next slot. You want to tighten it until the next slot. This one's very close so I would say we're lucky. Just going to put this on here. See if I can bring it a little further. That looks pretty good. We'll grab a cotter pin, put it through, we'll grab a little bigger. I like to go with the biggest size cotter pin I can fit. That feels great. Love it. Grab my cutters, bring the ear up.

You can do whatever you want with these ears. You can bring one up, you can bring the other one down. You can bring one side to side, whatever you want to do, as long as you have it straight through and then bent up and over to the point that there's no way that this cotter pin can come out. That's what locks this nut in. If you don't have a cotter pin, there's nothing holding this nut. The nut comes free, tie rod comes down, wheel does whatever it wants. Lock it in. That looks great. Let's move along.

All right, let's torque these down, 103 foot pounds. That feels good. This one. Tight. Tight. All right, so we've got our axle nut. Start it on here. We're just going to bottom this out now. We're not going to put the hammer down or anything. Perfect. Let's grab the torque specification and we can move along. All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a nice long pry bar. I'm just going to go right over my lug studs like this and I'm going to try to keep my bar flat along the stud threads. And that's just so I'm not damaging the threads while I do this. The reason why I put my bar going like this, is so the hub can't turn when I go to torque this nut. We're going to use our 36 millimeter socket and we're going to torque this nut to 203 foot pounds with our torque wrench. Try it one more time. We know that's definitely torqued. Grab our bar, move along.

Okay, so we've got our lock and you'll notice that it has a whole bunch of slots where the corners of your axle nut can go into and you've got a whole bunch of little slots here for where your cotter pin's going to go through. The reason for that is so when you go to put it on, in case when you go to put it on, the hole doesn't line up with the slot, you just keep turning it and turning it until you find an area where it lines up perfectly. Once you do, I like to use a brand new cotter pin for this. Obviously this is super important that it stays on there and hold that in there. Grab some cutters, come down like this, grab this one, bring it up. Just give them a couple of bonks. Awesome.

When we go to put on the cap, I like to use a little bit of gasket maker or RTV and I just go right along the edge here where this is going to mate with the bearing itself and if for some reason when you were taking this cap off originally, if you happen to have poked a hole through here and you can see it coming through the other side, this doesn't have a hole, it's just pushed in. But anyway, if it did, you would want to make sure that you put some kind of gasket maker there as well to make sure that no moisture can get inside this cap and then get this all rusted up on you. All right, we're just going to use a little bit of gasket maker here. See if we can get it working. Sometimes it likes to be a pain in the butt. Looks like it's trying to. Just going to go right along here. It doesn't have to be anything pretty. I'm not trying to win a coloring contest or anything like that. That looks pretty decent. Just as long as it's going all the way around.

If you wanted to and you had a gloved finger, you could just kind of schmutz it all around. Make sure that you have a nice layer. Going to use my rubber mallet. Set this in just like this. Just give it a couple loving bonks all the way around. It's best if you try to bonk along the edges and drive it in instead of in the center. obviously if you bonk in the center, you could collapse it in so just along the edges. And if for some reason you're not using a rubber mallet, you're using a metal hammer, when you go like this, if you bonk and you end up hitting one of these studs, that's going to become an issue, so you're going to want to keep that in mind. If you damage the threads on this, you're just going to have to try to clean them up with something. You use a small file, tap and die set or something like that, but you need to make sure your lug nuts can go on there. That's why I'm using a rubber mallet.

I'd say that that looks pretty great. Going to use my gloved finger or you can use a rag. Definitely don't use your bare hand or bare finger. This is of course a chemical. I don't want anybody getting sick. I'd say that that looks wonderful. Give it a little spin. I love it. It looks perfect. Let's continue.

All right, so we're just going to clean up our rotor here. A lot of times brand new rotors come with a coating on them that just helps prevent rust and anything really from messing up the nice, beautiful surface that they made. I just like to take a little bit of parts cleaner, give it a little spray, wipe it down. That looks great. I'm going to grab some copper never seize, I'm just going to try to spray the base of this. That's right where the rotor's going to be mating up against. The reason for that is it's going to help keep moisture out of there and also make it so the rotor's going to come off easily when it's time to take it back off someday to do another brake job like this.

Now's a great time before we get the caliper on here, just to double check and make sure that the backing plate hasn't been bent in, because if it's hitting up against the rotor now, it's obviously going to hit up against the rotor later. Give it a little spin. That sounds horrible. Let's check it out. Carefully give it a little push. Obviously there are some sharp edges. Your backing plate may or may not look like this, but if it has sharp edges, I want you to be super careful. Just going to take a pry bar. Just try to help this backing plate along. It's seen its day. It's obviously not in the best condition, but just keep working your way around. Find all the places where it might be hitting and just maneuver it away a little bit. Looks like it's hitting just a teeny bit right down here still. Ooh, love it.

Now we're going to take our caliper, bring it right over here, work it right down. I know what you're thinking. Who puts on the caliper without putting the pads together first? Well, you can think that if you want, and that's fine. I'm not going to get mad at you, but I'm going to show you why. We're going to get this all together. We're going to get it torqued down and then we'll install the pads. I'm just going to grab my ratchet with my 17, snug it up. Going to bottom both these bolts out then we'll torque them down. Torque specifications for this is 91 foot pounds. Torqued, torqued. Awesome.

Now it's time to get the brake hose back into the bracket here. And you might notice that, when you were hanging it or whatever happened, maybe the lines straighten itself out or it changed its position. Or as we move this around, start noticing that it gets kind of close, which is good. Just going to try to spin this now. This forky's going right through. It's got this locked in perfectly. We don't have to worry about our flex hose moving around. I'd say that looks pretty great. Let's move along.

Okay, so it's time to grab our pads. Just slide it right in just like this. That's cool. Same thing with this one. It should slide right in. If for some reason your pads don't slide in like this one does and it moves around very freely, odds are you need to clean up your caliper. Obviously this is a new caliper, so it's going to slide perfectly. If it wasn't, and it was an old caliper and we tried cleaning it up with our brush and our screwdriver or whatever you use to get off the large chunks, if the pads can't move, you've got a little bit more work to do. Just going to go through like this. I'm going to leave that one just like that. This one, I'm just going to go all the way through.

Grab one of my little clips here, put it through this one. That feels great. Can't fall out. Awesome. The reason why I left this one like this, is because we've got this little clippy-do here. And what this is going to do is it's going to want to separate the pads. When you step on the brake, the pads, the pistons are going to squeeze the pads and then you release the brake, the pistons are going to want to go back in and this is going to make the pads go back out. Okay, very nice. I'm going to go right over the pin just like this. Now I'm going to take this here, put it in, everything's lined up great. Grab my other little clip, slide it through. Awesome.

Next what we're going to do, we're going to make it so this little piton goes inside the hole there and this ear comes up over the top of the pad. Do the same thing for this one. Awesome. Now let's assume we're inside the vehicle and we step on the brake, we release the brake, step on it, release. That's doing its job. Something to pay attention to is when you mount this in, you want to make sure that this area of the clip isn't hitting up against your rotor. It's very possible that maybe it's bent a little bit and it wants to hit like this one is. Super close. What I like to do at this point, just grab it, give it a little tug.

Now I've got a pretty good distance between there and there. Just give it a little push. It goes back down. Let's try again. Give it a little push. It goes back down, but it's still clearing the rotor. It's not hitting at all. At that point it looks perfect.

Now we're going to grab our wheel. These wheels can be heavy and I don't want you to hurt yourself, so instead of grabbing your wheel like this and trying to lift with your back and potentially hurting yourself, show you a little secret. You take your leg. I'm assuming you're not worried about your pants getting a little dirty. Just going to grab it like this. Roll it right up your leg. Now you can use your legs slash ab muscles to lift it right up. Can use your leg to hold it, balance it. See, that works pretty good. I'm going to take my lug nut, my socket. Put it right on here. Now that we know we've got one locked in, we can release it, grab the rest of our lug nuts. We're going to start all these on. We'll bottom them out and then we'll torque them down.

All right, so let's bottom out these lug nuts. Perfect. We'll get this down on the ground and we'll torque them down to manufacturer specifications. Okay, friends, let's get our torque down. We've got our 21 millimeter socket. We've got our torque wrench set to 83 foot pounds. We're going to go on a crisscross manner. Okay, I'm just going to go around one more time. It's a small price to pay for safety. Awesome.

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