How to Replace Outer Tie Rods 2002-09 Dodge RAM 1500 Truck

Okay, friends. To get started on this vehicle, the first thing we wanna talk about is safety. You want hand and eye protection. Secondly, you wanna make sure that you raise and support the vehicle by the frame so the suspension's hanging. Next, let's remove our lug nuts. Remove your wheel. Now that we have the wheel off, we have a nice, clear view of our tie rod ends. Just a quick note, whenever I'm replacing tire rod ends, I usually like to do them as a pair. With that said, let's break free our jam nut.

Here we are. Let's get our locking cotter pin out of here. There we are. Let's go ahead and remove this nut. Put that back on a couple of threads. The next thing we're gonna do is separate the tie rod end from the knuckle itself. You can do that with a couple loving bonks with a hammer. Unscrew the outer tie rod end and make sure you count the threads as you come off, one, two, three, and so on. Twenty-two for me. Time to put on the outer tie rod end. Make sure you put on as many turns as you did to remove the original, one, two, three, and so on. That should line up perfectly. If it doesn't, you might've moved this a little bit or you might be off. Snug this up, torque this to 45 foot-pounds. Now we need to take a look and make sure that the slotted area of our nut lines up with the hole in the tie rod stud. If it doesn't, you need to continue tightening until the first one does. Go ahead and peen that over.

Now it's gonna be time to tighten our jam nut. To do that, you wanna hold your tie rod so it can't spin because you don't wanna damage the ball and socket area. Now let's go ahead and snug this. There we go. If your tire rod's crooked, just make sure you straighten it out so it's level with the ground. Go ahead and put the wheel back up on here. We're gonna start all of our lug nuts and then we'll torque them to 130 foot-pounds.