How to Replace Rear Forward Control Arm 2000-11 Ford Focus

Hey, friends. It's Lenny here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on our 2001 Ford Focus. It's the ZX3 model with the hatchback. We're going to be replacing the rear forward lower control arm. It sounds complicated, but it's in the rear of the vehicle. It's the forward lower control arm. It's going to be easy peasy. I can do it. You can do it too.

As always, if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks. Okay, so one of the first things we have to do is take off the wheel, obviously. We're going to remove our lug nuts. These are missing the caps. Usually they have a chrome cap on them. That would make them 19s. These are actually closer to an 18 so that's what I'm going to use to remove it, but generally speaking, you're going to use a 19 to remove your lug nuts.

Leave that one on there a little bit. That's just going to help prevent the wheel from falling off when I take off the last one. Set this aside. Take off our wheel, set it to the side. So we're gonna go ahead and do the forward lower control arm. This is kind of like a side to side control arm. It just keeps things from moving around side to side. I'm going to use a 15 millimeter up here and a 15 millimeter back here.

These bolts are screwed into welded nuts so you don't have to worry about holding the back side with your wrench or locking pliers or anything like that. They were nice enough to weld them on there for us. There we are. Oh, yeah. All right, nice and loose. I'm just going to try to wiggle the arm around. There's our bolt, okay? Comes through from the front of the vehicle towards the rear. We'll set this aside. Let me see if I can get the control arm to break free so I can hopefully have an opportunity to get this bolt out.

What happens is, is everything kind of kinks in. So if you have this unbolted right here or the bushings are bad in it or whatever, what you'll notice is is the rear can do this, which you do not want it to do. Okay? So that's the importance of this right here. It's kind of like a stabilizing arm. It's our lower bolt. Put that aside, grab this, pull it right out of here.

So here we are friends, a quick product comparison for you. Over here we have our rear suspension, forward lower control arm out of our 2001 Ford Focus hatchback ZX3. Over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. As you can tell both parts are the exact same. We have the same mounting holes, same shape, same length, super important. They're both the exact same. With that said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part to install into the vehicle. So I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com.

Okay, so we've got our forward lower control arm here. You'll notice that it bubbles out this way and it's inverted this way. The inverted goes towards the rear of the vehicle and the bubbled out portion goes towards the forward end of the vehicle. Put this up in here like that, so it's lined up. You can use some thread locker on these bolts if you'd like to, it's your prerogative. For the purpose of this video I'm not going to worry about it.

Just going to get that in there like that. Okay. Now we've just got to get this lined up. Give this a couple of loving bonks here. That looks pretty great. Okay, so this is pretty close. You can see that the hole in this right here does not line up with the hole in the control arm yet. So what we're going to have to do is we're just going to have to try to pull this this way a little bit. So I'm going to grab my ratchet strap. Get it set up. Okay. We've got this set up. I'm just bringing this over. Let's see the holes lining up here.

Let's see if that's lined up the wrong way. There it is. So it's definitely started. This one's definitely started. Get this off of here. Get our ratchet strap off of here. Now I'm going to put some pressure underneath here and get the vehicle to curb ride height, and then I'll go ahead and snug these up. Now that I've got the suspension compressed, the springs are compressed, the shocks compressed I'm just going to snug these up.

Okay, that's snug. Same thing for this one. Okay, it's bottomed out. Bottomed out. Let's torque them, 85 foot pounds. I've got my torque wrench. Just gonna try it one more time. Tight. All right, we'll hit it one more time. Tight. Tight. On to the next step. Here we are. Just going to wheel it up my leg. Cool. We've got our lug nuts. We're just going to snug up these lug nuts.

There we are. Bring it down, torque them up. Okay, so here we go. We're going to torque these down to 94 foot pounds with our torque wrench. Go around again. There we are. Do the same to the other side of the vehicle.

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