How to Replace Rear Lower Control Arm 2010-15 Chevy Camaro

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The story with this 2011 Camaro is that it was going around a left hand turn, and some sort of bang happened, and when it went around the corner, the lower control arm actually bent. When that happened, it obviously turned the wheel in a direction that it wasn't supposed to go in, so you can see it's cambered way out on the top, and the toe of the wheel is way off too, so it's almost like it's turning right when it should most certainly be straight. We're going to replace the control arm, probably replace the hub, and see where that takes us. There may be some other damaged parts in there, but we're not sure until we get it apart.

Before jacking up the car, we want to loosen the lug nuts, because it'll be easier to take the wheel off once it's up in the air. We'll use a 22-millimeter socket and a long ratchet to break the lug nuts loose. We are going to be using a lift to jack up the vehicle, but it is very much possible to do this in a driveway with a jack and jack stands. We actually have another video that we've already made showing you where to properly lift a Camaro of this body style, so you'll want to check out that for the proper lift points before taking the wheel off.

Now that the vehicle's off the ground, we can finish taking off the wheel. We'll just spin all the lug nuts loose, and we'll take the wheel off. You can see right here is where the control arm folded up, and it bent the sway bar end link as well. When you compare it to a new one, it's pretty impressive to see just how mangled the control arm is. It actually collapsed itself up here, and it folded right at the point of where the sway bar attaches.

We're going to start off this project by hitting all of the bolts that we'll be removing with some rust penetrant. If you live anywhere where there's rust, this is going to save you. We're going to start by removing the sway bar end link. It has a 15 millimeter nut on top of it, and then a 5 millimeter fits right in the center of it to hold the sway bar end link bolt in place. We'll start by putting the 15 millimeter on the nut, and then the 3/16" Allen, and then we'll be able to loosen the nut without the whole thing spinning. Once you've got the nut completely loose, you can finish taking the nut off and then you should be able to pop this off with a pry bar.

Where this one is damaged, it seems to be stuck on there pretty good, so we'll probably have to take out the bottom half as well. So now we're going to take off the bottom one, which is also a 15-millimeter nut, and then a 5-millimeter Allen head to hold the center. Right now the sway bar is sort of stuck in place, you can't really get a wrench on here very well, because it's putting pressure against the wrench when you turn it, so we're going to put a pry bar in here, pry down on the sway bar, and pop the end link out of it. Like that. Since we're going to be replacing the sway bar end link anyways because it's bent, we're just going to leave it in the lower control arm and take the whole thing out and throw it away.

On the outermost bolt, there's an 18 millimeter nut on the front side of the bolt, and then an 18-millimeter head on this side, and we're going to begin taking this bolt out with an 18-millimeter socket and an 18-millimeter wrench. The lower shock bolt is a 21-millimeter nut on this side, and then 21-millimeters on this side as well. So we'll use a socket and a wrench to break them loose.

The inner control arm bolt is also 21 millimeters on both sides, the nut and the head, so we're going to be removing those as well with the wrench and the ratchet. One thing to note is that these bolts have washers that go on them a very specific way, and they actually adjust the alignment of the rear wheel, so you want to make sure that these washers go back on the same exact way that they came off. You can spray paint them around here before you remove them. In our case, there's plenty of rust buildup around there so we can see exactly where they were. We have to remove the bolts out of the control arm so that we can get it off the vehicle. We're going to start by hitting the shock bolt out, and then we'll move to the inner control arm bolt, and then we'll do the outer one last. So we'll start here. You may have to spin it out because there's a little bit of pressure on it from the shock. With the nut off the backside of this bolt, you should be able to spin it right out with a little bit of pressure. It's going to take a lot of turns to get out, but it'll slowly but surely come out.

Normally this bolt comes out really easily just by pushing on it, but in our case we believe the bolt was actually damaged in the accident that this vehicle had, so we ended up hammering on it, twisting it with some extreme pressure and some air tools, and eventually we resorted to actually cutting the control arm off of the vehicle. We took a cut-off wheel and we sliced through the center of the bushing, and that released all pressure on the bolt, and then we were able to knock it out of the sub-frame.

All right, so we got the new control arm, and we're going to place it right where it needs to be in the sub-frame. We're going to slide the bolt in to where it belongs. The bolt has a very specific washer that goes on it. As you can see, it's not centered, and it locks in between these grooves in the sub-frame. We'll just loosely attach it for now, ideally when the job is done, you'll go get an alignment, and they'll be able to turn this bolt in one direction or the other, and it will adjust the alignment of the rear wheel.

The next one is the shock, and it may take a little maneuvering, but we'll get it in place, throw the bolt through. We're going to put a little anti-seize on all these bolts so that the next time they come apart, it comes apart much nicer than it did the first time. This bolt is right here, and as you can see it doesn't really line up all that great, so you have to kind of wobble the knuckle around until you get the bolt hole lined up. Once you get it in, it should slide right through, and then you can put the nut on the backside.

Here we have the new sway bar end link from 1A Auto. As you can see, it has the Allen heads in the center, and it comes with the nuts of course. We'll slide in the bottom first, and loosely put the nut on. And then, we'll slide it in the upper hole and again loosely put the nut right on. The innermost trailing arm bolt is going to be tightened to 74 foot-pounds, and at the beginning of the video we talked about marking where this washer sits. Sometimes there's like a rust ring around it where you can just line it right back up again, and that'll get you into the ballpark of where the control arm should be. If you don't know where this thing should be, you should definitely go get it aligned as soon as possible. In any case, you should really get this aligned afterwards because your trailing arm is going to set the alignment for the whole right rear of the vehicle in this case.

So we're going to set this to 74 foot-pounds, and tighten it up. The lower shock bolt is supposed to be torqued to 59 foot-pounds, and then 120 degrees of turning. So we'll start with 59 foot-pounds. We now need to turn this nut 120 more degrees to be sure that it's tightened all the way, according to the factory spec, so this is an angle gauge that you put in between the ratchet and the socket, and it measures the distance that it goes around. So as you can watch on the gauge, we'll go 120 degrees. And that sets it to 120, and now we know it's tight. The outermost bolt right here, 18-millimeter, much like this one, it is 30 foot-pounds, and then it's 120 degrees of turning.

So you have to set it with a torque wrench first, so we'll set this to 30 foot-pounds, hold the other side with the wrench, and then. Now we'll set this to 120 degrees. The sway bar end link is installed with a 15-millimeter wrench. We like to use a ratcheting wrench because it makes it a little easier, and then a 5 millimeter Allen wrench. Put the Allen in the center, 15 on the outside. For the top, the same thing, put your wrench on the outer nut, and then 5-millimeter Allen in the center. Now we're going to put the wheel back on and loosely install all lug nuts. Now that the lug nuts are tightened by hand, we're going to set it right back down on the ground and torque them to 140 foot-pounds.

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