How to Replace Lower Radiator Support Bracket 2000-07 Ford Focus

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2001 Ford Focus and I'm going to show you how to do a lower radiator support. It's going to be a very easy job and I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. So if you need this or any other part can always check us out at 1aauto.com, thanks.

So I'm going to remove the whole horn assembly. I'm just going to take the bolt out for the bracket and then I'm going to hang it down. Let it hang out, wait for me. So I'm going to use a 10 millimeter ratchet wrench because it's the easiest thing I can get in here, remove this bolt. There we are. That's our little bolt. Super small. We'll set this aside where we won't lose it. You can take this horn assembly bracket right out of here. See if we can get this off now. Oh yeah. Nice. Oh yeah, it was clogged up with stuff. Take a look at our wiring. It looks like it's in good condition. I don't see any funny colors in there. It was just dirt and crud. So we'll set this stuff aside. We'll move along.

Okay. Now we're going to remove our 10 millimeter head bolts. Get this on here. Safety glasses of course. That's what one of the bolts looks like. I can grab the other one. I'm just going to try to leave this one in a little bit just so I can go over the other side and hopefully it'll hold it stable for me. We'll set that one bolt aside. One, two, just grab both of those. Nice and rusted. Okay, this should be able to move around quite a bit. All right. This piece right here is what is actually holding in the radiator right now and also the radiator's holding in your AC condenser and everything else.

So you need to keep that in mind when you're under here because this can come down and it could hit you in the face at any given time. You want to make sure that you're as safe as possible, okay. I'm going to put these bolts aside. Then I'm going to try to lower this down. Try to give myself a little bit of wiggle room. I'm going to see if I can weasel this out of here and I'm going to try and get this to hold up the AC condenser once it's unattached from the radiator.

Okay, we've got the bottom of a clip right here. I'm just going to try to come up along the top. Just pull that out of there, there we are. Okay. I don't think there's anything else attached to this at this point, so we'll just take out our one other bolt. Find my tool. Just pulling a few threads. Yes. Okay.

I'm going to slowly lower this down. I don't want to go too far because these are your AC lines right here and even though they're mounted metal to metal here, there's also a rubber area. So there is some room for some flexibility, but of course you just want to be as careful as possible because this has Freon inside, which is a poisonous gas. You don't want to breathe it in. If for some reason something happened and one of these lines cracked or opened up and you noticed that there was Freon emptying out into the air space around you.

So now I'm just going to try to lift up on the radiator. Get this bar out of here. Here's our radiator support.

Here we are friends. A quick product comparison for you. Over here we have our original radiator support from our 2001 Ford Focus and over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. Both these parts are made exactly the same in length, the way that everything's carved out, right. Got our radiator, sits down in here. Super important, got our mounting holes, it looks exactly the same. There really isn't much I can say about it. It's got everything it needs to have. All the mounting holes that we need and it looks the exact same, cut out area for the horn. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part to go ahead and install into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. For this or any other part you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so we've got our bracket. We've got our four bolts. I'm just going to take it and kind of come up and in between here, like this, swinging around under the bumper cover. There we are. Just going to try to lift up the radiator and everything, and I'm going to try to slide this on top of the jack, but underneath the radiator. Let's see if I can get it up there. There we are. We're getting the little mounts into their little spots where they want to be. Just like that. Cool. All right, we can raise it up. We'll have the jack do the majority of the lifting here. We can just kind of set it where we need it.

I'm just going to get all four bolts started before we tighten any of them down of course. There we are. Okay, those are all started. We'll grab our 10 millimeter and we'll tighten them down.

Okay, just going to zip these in. Just make sure they bottomed out. Yup. Do the other two. This one. All four 10 millimeter bolts are tight. All right, feels good. We'll lower this a little bit. Oh yeah, that feels great. Cool beans. Let's move along.

Okay, so something you'll notice on your horn bracket is you have this little hooky do. That's going to go in this top hole right here. Okay. And then your bolt goes in this hole right there. So essentially the horn's going to be sitting pretty much like this inside the vehicle. So we're going to bring the horn up and in, we'll set our hooky do up inside our groove there. Bring our bolt around. There we are. I'm going to grab my 10 millimeter ratchet wrench. You can use whatever you have that's a 10 millimeter. Make sure it's nice and tight. Obviously we don't want to break the bolt. We don't need to really grip onto it too much. We'll give it a little wiggle. It feels good. If it feels like it's too close and you're worried it's going to vibrate, just bend it away. There we are. Now it's not going to make any noise. I put it in a little bit of silicone paste. Helps everything slide nice and easy. Let's wrap this wire right around there and there we go. Horn's installed.

We've got this little clippy do that we removed. That just presses into this hole right here. Let's see if I can. There it is. Pop through. Give it a little tug. That feels good.

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