How to Replace Sway Bar Links 2002-09 Dodge RAM 1500

Okay, friends. To get started on this vehicle, the first thing we want to talk about is safety. You want hand and eye protection. Secondly, you want to 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. Okay, friends. So here's our front sway bar link. As you can tell ours is broken at the top. So I have the new one here to show you. If you were to look at it, you have the stud that comes down through the bottom of the control arm. Following it up, you're going to find another stud up along the top that comes to the top of the sway bar itself. On top of that, there'll be a little bushing, a washer, and a nice nut. You would of course remove the nut and then the washer and the bushing, and then you'll be left with this.

Next, we're going to move right down here and we're going to remove this nut. I'm just going to take a nice pair of locking pliers like this, clamp it onto this stud, make it as tight as possible. Let's remove that 18 millimeter nut. Okay, for us personally, where the top of ours is broken, this is going to come out nice and easy. If you still had the top of the stud on your sway bar link, what you're going to notice is it's going to be very hard to get it out. You could try to pry up on the pry bar and see if you can squeeze it out. But in all actuality, when you're replacing sway bar links, you do them as a pair anyway. So now's a perfect time to go over and remove the right one as well.

Here we are. There's our old sway bar link. Let's dispose of this properly and grab our new one. Let's go ahead and take apart our sway bar link so it looks like this with a washer and one bushing up along the top there. You can slide it into either direction you want, and then of course, we're going to bring the bar down once we have the other side in as well. Let's start this nut on here. Looking at the lower aspect of the sway bar link, where it's going to connect to the actual control arm, you can see there's like a little nut there. We're going to hold that and then turn this.

Now we're going to snug up this nut and we're just going to watch these bushings right here. You wanna see them touch up against the bar, but you definitely don't want to see them squished down so they look like a pancake and start bubbling out. That looks pretty great right there. You can see it's squished down here, squished down there. It's definitely making contact with both sides of the bar. Do the same thing to the other side and make sure you have the same amount of threads on both sides. Let's torque this to 20 foot-pounds. Go ahead and put the wheel back up on here. We're going to start all of our lug nuts and then we'll torque them to 130 foot-pounds. Torqued.