How to Replace Lower Ball Joint 2010-14 Hyundai Sonata

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on a 2010 Hyundai Sonata. We're going to be doing a lower ball joint assembly. It's going to be very easy. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. So if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. So here we go, friends.

I've got the vehicle supported off the ground. I have the wheel just barely touching the ground, with the majority of the weight of the vehicle up. I'm using my 21mm socket. I'm going to loosen all my lug nuts. I'm not going to loosen them up very much, just a couple little cranks to break them free. Then, once I get the vehicle up in the air to a working height, that's when I'll finish removing the lug nuts. So just break them free with your 21. Last one, holding my wheel. Just going to drop that down. Get my wheel down safely and set it right out of the way.

So right here's the lower ball joint. It's got three mounting screws, or nuts, and then a bolt right there. Then, a bolt with a nut right there. Anyway, I just wanted to show you, if you watch right here. This is your knuckle, there's the ball joint, watch that boot. I'll show you what we're dealing with. There shouldn't be any of that movement. So we're going to go ahead and replace this ball joint. We've got our little locking cotter pin here. I'm going to go ahead and take that out, you can cut it if you need to, or whatever. Then, we're going to hold the back side of the bolt with a 17mm wrench. We're going to take off this nut with a 17, we're going to drive that bolt out. Once that's free we can move ahead. We'll remove these two nuts, this bolt up here, all 17s. We should be cruising.

Try to wiggle it around a little bit. Penetrant spray is always a good idea for most things, it'll just help you out along the line. There's our cotter pin. If you got a new one, that's great. So we've got our cotter pin out, I've got my 17mm wrench on the bolt side. I'm going to turn the socket side with my ratchet to the left, or counterclockwise. Try to get this nut off of here. See if I can get it off here. Sometimes they come off easier than others. There we are. Okay. Come on, almost there. So there's our nut.

This is our pinch bolt, it just goes through the knuckle from one side to the other, and the nut holds it nice and tight. Sometimes you'll get these and they'll be frozen in, and you might be tempted to hit it with a hammer. The best thing that you could do would be to take a socket on the other side. Well, first, spray it all down. Then, take a socket with the other side, and just try to turn that bolt as much as you can to break it free. Once it's free, hopefully, you can just try to pull it out. You can try to blast it with an air gun and see if you can get it to really warm up in there, then the bolt might come free. So I'm just going to try to push this through. All right, so I'm just going to push this through. There we are. So here we go, there's our bolt.

You'll notice that there's four holes for where the cotter pin goes through. Essentially, that's going to make the end of this bolt pretty weak, right? So if you were to take your hammer and this was frozen in your knuckle, and you're banging on here. All that's going to happen is this is just going to collapse and make a mess, munge up your threads, maybe even bend it over. At that point, you'll have to replace the bolt. So that way there, you can have it be able to lock with the cotter pin and all that. Or, there could be other fabrication that you could do. But, the best thing to do would be to just replace the bolt with another quality bolt, and it has to be grade 8. Okay? Don't just use a Home Depot grade 5 bolt or anything like that. You need something very structurally integral. So just go with original quality, grade 8. So that's what it looks like. We'll set this aside.

Now, if we wanted to we could use pickle fork, because we're going to be replacing this ball joint. We'll go right in between here, the knuckle and the ball joint, try to break it free. Once we do that we can remove these, and this up here, and we should be able to move along. So I've got my pickle fork, I'm going to go right where this boot is. The ball joint's garbage, so I'm not worried about destroying anything. I'm going to go in between the knuckle and the ball joint, try to get it in there. Then, I'm going to hammer it, I've got my safety glasses on, of course. There we are. All right. So I can see the ball joint sticking down through now. So I'm going to grab a 17, I'm going to remove these two. A 17 on the top, this ball joint should be able to just come right out. I'm going to start with the top. I'm just going to try to squeeze this in, being careful not to damage my axle boot. Once I get this broken free, if I wanted to, I could use a wrench, because as it unscrews, it's going to keep going up, driving my ratchet up into the axle. That's how it goes into the threads. Just blast these ones down here again real quick. I'm going to try using my ratchet wrench, turning to the left, of course.

There's our upper bolt. Now, we remove our lower nut. So now what we can do, just try hammering on this. All I want to do is try to separate the ball joint from the control arm. All right? You can try to stick a pry bar in there, or whatever you have access to. All we got to do is break it free, the hardest part's going to be getting it broken free, probably, from there. Then, we're right there. We'll spray them again. Why not? Doesn't cost too much for this stuff. Let's see if I can get it up in here. Okay. Flashlight down, all right. It's going to take a little bit more abuse, but we'll get it. So you got control arm, ball joint, right in between there, there's a very small crack that I'm going to try to weasel this pry bar into. I just want to try to separate the two. If you have a punch or whatever you might use, chisel. You can try whatever you've got. But, essentially, we just need to get them separated.

So I finally got it separated. I put a little heat going around here on the ball joint. I tried spraying up between the ball joint and the control arm. Then, I just used my air chisel, and I went right along this ear right here. Then, the same thing on the other side. Right along that ear. I kept going until it popped apart. It took a little while. You would've been watching this video for hours, or at least it seemed like a good 15, 20 minutes of me doing it to break them free. But, the reason why they were in and stuck like that is because they've got these right here. We've got these splines right here, and the splines press into the part of the ball joint. I'll grab the other ball joint and I'll show you, the one that's not hot. But, essentially, when we get it all lined up, we're going to tighten up the nuts and it'll force these splines up into the ball joint, hold it nice and tight. So I'll grab that and I'll show you.

Like I was showing you, we've got our ball joint. New ball joint. These splined areas right here, are going to get pressed in to these parts of the holes right here. So when I mount this up, the bolt's going to come down through the control arm into here. These are going to go down through this way. Then, as I tighten it up, those splines are going to get pressed right into the top side of these holes. Okay? That's going to hold it in nice and tight.

So now we're going to get our ball joint out of the knuckle. You can use your pickle fork or whatever you've got. Whatever you need to do to get it out. I'll try to do this. Try to hit it with a hammer, bonk, bonk, bonk. Whatever you need to do to get it out. I'm going to grab my hammer. So I'm just working it. Whatever I got to do to get it down. All right, I got my eye protection on. I'm just going to try to hammer this down. If you have access to one of these air chisels, you're doing pretty good. Here it is.

Let's spray a little bit of Copper Never Seize up inside this hole right here. Just going to make the job a little bit easier 100,000 miles from now, or however long to replace the ball joint again some day, if we ever need to. So now that's in there, we'll just see if the stud slides in. Seems like it goes in pretty easy. Perfect, all right. So now we've just got to get everything situated so we can get these two studs in through here. We'll get the nuts started on there, we'll get everything going. I'm just going to get it down to a working height that I can work on it, and we'll go from there.

So here we go, I'm just going to get the ball joint in, slide it in there. I'm going to take my bolt, it's brand new, it's going to come right through the knuckle just like that. I don't need to really put on the nut or anything yet. I can, but basically, I'm just kind of putting it through for now, just to hold the ball joint from moving so I have two hands for maneuverability of everything else. So I'm going to pull down on a pry bar, I'm going to try to get this control arm to come down. I'm going to try to align these up with the stud holes, or the studs with the holes. Then, I'm going to try a couple nuts, see if I can get them started. Okay?

So I got my two new nuts, got my long pry bar. I'm going to try to pull this down. See if I can get them started on there. Okay, those are started. I'm just going to snug them up a little bit, but I'm going to try not to go all the way, because I still need to line up this last hole. But, by getting these closer, it's going to make it so I can get that last bolt in, and it should go in straight. Okay. I'm going to grab my bolt, try and get it through here. You can use Threadlocker on these if you wanted to, it's your preference. For the purpose of this video I'm not going to worry about it. Now that I have all of them started just like that, just make sure it is. Yeah, it's going through good. All right. Now, we're clear to just tighten all these down.

Sometimes you'll get a ball joint and it'll come with new bolts. They're supposed to replace these studs. It's up to you if you want to try to replace it or not. I think part of the reason why this one came with the new bolt is not only because sometimes the studs can stretch, but also because the holes in the ball joint itself don't have enough room for that collared area that has the splines that I was noting out to you. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to drive these studs up and out, like that, straight out. Them, I'm going to take this bolt, boom, goes right through. It's a grade 8, it says 10.9 on there, so that's grade 8. These are what they came with. I'm going to replace with the nuts that came with it as well. So we'll just drive these out, we'll replace these two, and we'll keep moving.

Air gun, stud, stud, going up. Okay? If you didn't have access to this, you could probably try bonking it with a hammer, that's up to you. This one's ready to come out. Let's see if I can get it. Okay. I'm just going to take out this right here, so I can move everything around, and we'll get this right out of the way. So I undid that bolt, it let the ball joint back free. I'm going to pry down on the control arm, remove that stud. Got my two new bolts, both the same. Just going to pry down on this control arm a little bit, drop right through. Just to show you, these fit right through. There we are. Now, we can just kind of get these going. Might have to get the vehicle down to a lower level here, we'll see. Let me get this up and out of the way. All right, I'm just going to grab my two nuts, see if I can get one started here. There we go.

Now, we'll get this back down to a workable level so we can line everything up and get our last bolt screwed in. I'm just going to try to pull down on this, see if I can get this bolt lined up. I tried leaving the other nuts loose, so I can move everything around. If I tighten them up, these two holes might not line up very well. So I've got those. Let's see about snugging this up. I'm feeling down at the bottom, I can feel the bolt starting to come through, so I know I'm lined up good. It's not turning in very difficultly, so that's good. Just bottom this out, then I'll go ahead and tighten it down once I get the other ones bottomed out. I'm just going to tighten it right down. These bolts came with locking nuts, so I don't have to worry about Threadlocker, that's nice. If your bolts do not have locking nuts, then you're going to have to make a decision on what you want to do. But, if they don't have a lock of any type, I would definitely use some sort of Threadlocker. I'm just going to tighten that puppy up and move over to the other one. Get it on there. There we are, okay.

Let's see about tightening up this last bolt up here. Perfect. So we've got all three of these tightened. We'll move up here, I'm just going to get the torque spec for it, and we'll move along. All right. So I got the torque spec, it's 65 foot pounds right here. So I'm going to hold the back of the bolt with a wrench. I'm going to tighten up the nut side. I just want to make a note that I looked up specs, there was no torque specifications for these, the mounting bolt there. So you're going to have to use your best judgment. Like I said, can use Threadlocker if that's something you have interest in. It's your prerogative.

I'm going to hold the back side. For me, it's a 19 on the back, and a 17 on the nut side. I'm going to try to torque it down to 65 foot pounds. There we are. I'm just going to do it one more time here. So we know this is tight, tight, tight, tight. Double check, make sure we didn't' remove anything else, we didn't disturb any ABS wires. Everything looks like it's still secured. Perfect. All right. Now we're clear to put the wheel back on and get it torqued on. All right, friends, it's time to get the wheel back on here. It's important to remember, you never want to lift with your back when doing something like this. Just take it, roll it up to your leg, lift it right up, then use your ab muscles to lift up the wheel. It's what they're there for, lifting wheels. Let's get this bonked on here. I'm going to hold the wheels so it can't go anywhere. I'm just going to start a couple of these.

It's time to torque these puppies down. I've got the majority of the weight of the vehicle still off the ground, but I've got the wheel touching. I don't want to have all the vehicle's weight down, because if it's got the wheel kinked, by the time I get to torquing this down to 80, it might not be enough to squish the wheel completely up against the hub, in which case, everything will loosen up. You'll be driving down the road and, well, it'll be bad news. So keep the majority of the weight off the vehicle, or off the ground, I mean. Sorry. Just want to have the wheel so it can't spin in the air. We're going to tighten these in a star pattern, with our 21mm. So I'm going to go here, here, here, here, make a nice pretty star, and then you can go around again if you want. It's up to you, 80 foot pounds.

Here we go. Hit it one more time. That completes our service. Great job. So now we'll just double check our work. I've got the wheel bottomed down, and I'm just going to give it a shake, see if we have any of that movement that we had before. Feels pretty great from out here. Before, I could wiggle the wheel all around because the ball joint was bad. You could feel the knuckle moving around in comparison to the lower control arm.

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