2009 Nissan Altima Base Model Front 6 Piece Steering Kit DIY Solutions SUS02330

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on our 2010 Nissan Altima, and I'm going to be showing you something very simple, replacing an inner tie rod end. It's very easy. I can do it. You can do it too. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, friends, so one of our first steps is to make sure that we have the vehicle's weight partially supported off the ground with the wheel still touching, and we're going to break free all the lug nuts. If you're going to be using an air gun, you don't have to worry about pretty much any of this except for getting the vehicle off the ground and then taking off the lug nuts.

I'm just going to show you using the ratchet for now, 21mm. We're just going to break all the lug nuts free. The reason for doing this while the wheel's still on the ground is just so the wheel can't spin while we try to break these free. There we are. All five are broken free.

Let's move on to the next step. Okay, so I'm just going to switch over to the air gun now, 21mm, but you can continue with a ratchet if you want. Just take off all five of these lug nuts.

First, what we're going to do, we'll spray this down, which I just did. I'm going to use some nice long pliers. Grab onto this jam nut right there. Just going to break it free. There we are. Let's see if it slid or if it broke free. Okay, it did break free. Cool. Now that we know we've got that broken free, let's move ahead to the next step.

We're going to take off this cotter pin, just basically it locks this nut in place so it can't come off. If you don't have access to a new one, try to save it. If you do have access to new ones, like I do, it is what it is, you can cut it and do whatever you need to do. Essentially, get it out of there. There we go. Just cut that off there gently. Get that stuff out of there.

Now we're going to remove that nut. All right, so I'm going to remove this nut. I'm going to use my 19mm socket, my 1A Auto air gun here. There we are. Got a washer and a nut. We'll set those aside. Going to grab our hammer, and we're going to give the knuckle, right across here, a couple loving bonks and see if we can get this to come up. There we are.

Take off this outer tie rod end. It's a good idea to count how many times it comes around. So, it started facing down, one, two, and so on. There we are. 17 turns, so we'll take mental note of that, or you can write it down if you don't have a very good memory. 17.

Okay, so now what we need to do is get our jam nut off of there, which is this right here. The reason why we need to do that is because the inner tie rod end, right here, has a boot around it. This boot does not come with your new inner tie rod end, and it never will, so if you needed to you could buy something like that. It comes separate from anywhere you were to try to purchase a new inner tie rod end.

To continue, though, we're going to use some locking pliers. We're going to get them on here as tight as we can. There we are. Cool. Tilt that down like that so it's hitting up against here. Now I'm going to grab my half-inch gun, my 22mm socket. Come right over here. 22mm socket, slide it on there. Hold our pliers. There we are. Our jam nut came off, if we can get it out of the socket. Looks like a no. Typical. There it is. Cool. We'll set this aside.

All right, so we've got the jam nut off. We'll get our locking pliers out of the way. The boot has a clamp right here. It's like a three-prong clamp. It's very easy to get off. I'm just going to use some long nose pliers or needle nose pliers. Call them what you want. Take that clamp off of there. Set it aside.

On the inside of this boot, all the way down at the power steering rack, there's a metal clamp. That clamp is not reusable. You're going to need access to something as basic as a wire tie, and I'll show you why. I'm using a long pry bar here. You can also use a screwdriver if that's what you have access to, and there's a little metal tab, pretty much right where my pry bar ends down there. I'm hitting up against it.

What we're going to do at this point, we're going to put our pry bar/screwdriver, whatever you're using, up against it, and I'm going to use a hammer, give it a loving bonk, hopefully drive that clamp off of there, and then we'll be able to get our boot off. What you need to be careful when you're doing this is that you don't pinch your boot. There we are. Try and get my arms in here. Just get that clamp out. That's what the clamp look like. Pretty much just went around like this. Like I said, it's not reusable. Once it gets crimped right here, that's how it gets tightened on, and then that's it. One-time use only.

We'll grab our boot, give it a couple little twists as we pull, and it should draw right off the rack. Okay, came off the rack on the inside there. Here's our power steering bellows boot. Easy peasy.

Okay, so now to get the inner tie rod end off of the power steering rack, you can use a pretty neat tool that we offer at 1AAauto.com. This right here goes right over the inner tie rod end. It's going to fit onto the bald end right here. You can tighten these up so the teeth grip on. Once it does, you just go ahead and use an extension and a nice long ratchet. Break it free, turn it right off of there.

If, for some reason, you didn't want to go on our site and buy this tool, it's okay. I'm not going to get mad at you. You could do something pretty easy too, and that would just be turn your wheel. When you go up into your vehicle, you can turn the wheel to the ... I would say to the right, and it's going to push out this inner tie rod end this way, which would want to turn the wheels to the right, obviously. When it does that, this bald end will probably come out to about here, and you can grab it with some nice long pliers and break it free. I'm going to go with the simpler way. Booyah, 1AAuto.

I'll show you how this goes on. You got your knurled ends, they come around both sides. They did a real nice job with that. I'm just going to slide it right over. I'm going to tighten up these two nuts here. Just need to get it in there so I can be able to tighten it. Going to use my 14mm wrench. Snug up these nuts.

I would go with the tighter, the better on this. You don't want it to slip. You have a tool like this and it starts slipping, you're going to mess up the teeth and then the tool is ultimately going to be useless the next time you go to use it. So, if you can get your wrench on there, you could try to tighten that one up as well. There's minimal room in this instance, so I could try to turn the wheel, like I said before. Bring it all the way out here, or even just far enough to come to there, but I think I probably got it tight enough just by tightening up that bottom one. I'm going to give it a try.

Okay. I've got a nice long ratchet, an extension that gets me out far enough. Let's go see if I can get this tie rod to break free. There we are. So that's ready to start spinning now. Now I'm just going to take my tool off of there. It did its job. I'm happy about that, so I'm going to let it take the rest of the day off. Just kidding. We're going to need it to reinstall, right? There's our tool. Take a rag. Just going to try to turn this. There's our inner tie rod end. Let's move along.

So here we are, friends. A quick product comparison for you. Over here, we have the inner tie rod end out of our 2010 Nissan Altima. And over here, we have our brand new, quality, 1A Auto part. These two parts are the exact same length, which is very important. They have the threaded area that goes into your power steering rack. They both have the same thread pitch, same thread length there, also important.

You've got your lip right here, where your bellows boot's going to ride into. That's going to make sure that when you put the bellows boot on, it can't just slide all the way up here or all the way down there. You come up this way, you've got a brand new locking jam nut. I say a locking jam nut, but it's just a jam nut. We'll say that. That sounds better. So, brand new jam nut. You've got your threaded portion where your outer tie rod end's going to screw onto.

It even comes with brand new grease for you, and this is great because what you're going to do is you're going to put it all inside this ball area, and once you have this screwed onto the power steering rack and you put some in there, you can just take your inner tie rod end, wiggle it all around. It's going to work its way in there. But one thing is, is to make sure you save a little bit of grease and put it right along here for when you're installing your bellows boot.

With all 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. Thanks.

I'm just going to take a rag, going to clean up a little bit around the end of the rack here, just so I have a clear view of what's going on. That looks pretty good. Okay, I can see the threaded area in there. Everything looks decent.

To move on to the next step, we have our inner tie rod end. If you wanted to, you could use a little dab of Threadlocker on here. I'm going to go grab some. I'll throw on a little splash of it, and then we'll move along.

Okay, so I grabbed a little bit of Threadlocker. I'm just going to take off this jam nut. We'll set it aside because we're going to be using this a little later. Take your inner tie rod end, put it into the threaded area on the rack. See if I can get it started. There we are. I didn't put on any of that grease yet, just because if I put on the grease now it might make a gooey mess, then I'm going to be putting my hands all over it and my tools. I don't know, I can go on and on about it, I'm sure, but ...

We'll grab our tool again and our 14mm wrench. Just going to slide this over here. I'm going to start it as high up as I can so that that way there, when I bring it down while I'm tightening, hopefully it'll have plenty of room to come down as far as it needs to to be fully tight. Get this nice and snugged up here, hopefully.

All right, now we're just going to snug up our inner tie rod end. Just tighten my tool up, and now I've got my ratchet on there. Basically you want to just bottom it out and then just give it a little bit extra. You don't need to go too far because, I mean, this is a nice long bar right here. If I kept going, there's pretty good odds that I could damage the rack by overtightening it, so just kind of bottom it out. Give it a little bit extra. Use your best judgment. Now we're going to take our tool off of here and we can move ahead.

Okay, we're just going to use our little grease pack that 1A was nice enough to supply us with. We're going to put it right in here. There we are. Like I said before, I saved some of it. Just go right along the little bowl area in there. Now I'm going to take the inner tie rod, just kind of work it around. This is going to help keep moisture out of there, and keep it lubricated, of course. There we are.

We got a whole bunch more in here, so you can put a little bit more. You really only need to save a little bit, and that's just for in this ring right here, right along here. It doesn't need to be very much for this, but the person that's going to be doing your alignment down the road, which you're going to need after you do all this, is going to be very thankful for this.

The reason for that is because once you get your bellows boot on there and the person that's going to be doing your alignment has to turn this to make the adjustment for your toe, the boot won't be caught on the inner tie rod end and twist and rip. So, that's going to give a nice lubricated point, and we can move along.

Okay, we're just going to take our power steering bellows boot. We're going to go just like this. Bring this so it's almost all the way down but still plenty loose. We'll cut off a little bit extra here because we don't need a whole bunch flapping off. There it is.

Now I'm going to slide this onto the power steering rack. Once we know it's all the way on, we'll grab this, pull our wire tie nice and tight, and then we'll trim off the excess. After that we'll continue on to the outer clamp. Just slide it in. There we are. The outer part just fell into its nice little groove there that we lubricated. In here, just double-check, make sure that boot's on all the way around. I just spin it like this. It's definitely on. Perfect.

Okay, I can see where my wire tie is in there. At this point, I would use my long nose pliers again. Just put them in there, find my tie. We want to make sure that the wire tie stays in the channel that it's supposed to be in, which is all the way down at the end there. All I'm doing is grabbing it and twisting. Once it feels like it gets to the point that it's not doing anymore clicking, that's pretty much it. I'm just going to go the other way real quick. All right. That's as tight as that's going to get. To be as professional as we can, we'll cut off the excess here. Get that out of there. We'll recycle that.

All right, we've got our other clamp. Just going to grab it like this. Slide it right on over, and release it. Give our boot a nice little tug. It's going nowhere. Let's move along.

Okay. It's always a good idea to put on a little bit of Copper Never-Seize here. If you don't have access to Copper Never-Seize, you could use a little bit of that grease that you used up here. Generally speaking, the Copper Never-Seize would be what most people would use, though. Any type of lubricant that'll get in between the threads of the inner tie rod end and to the jam nut will be helpful for you down the line. So, hopefully you won't have to worry about that jam nut getting frozen onto the inner tie rod end. So there's that.

Now we're going to grab our outer tie rod end and install that. When we removed our outer tie rod end, remember it was facing straight down. When I was turning it and taking it off, I counted 17 turns from down until when I took it off. I'm just going to start by going reverse here until I feel like it wants to grab. That's the beginning. Okay. One, two, three, and so on. We'll just get this locking nut out of the way for now. Going to bring this over, get it into the knuckle. Bonk, bonk.

We're going to put on our self-locking nut. We're going to torque that down. I'm just going to bottom it out for now. Okay, that's bottomed out. Let's grab the torque specification, and we'll torque it down. All right, so let's go ahead and torque this down. We're going to use our 19mm socket and torque it to 25 foot-pounds. There we are. Let's just check it one more time real quick. That's tight. Let's move along to the jam nut.

Here's our jam nut. I'm just going to take it, turn it, turn it, turn it to the left until it's bottomed out against the outer tie rod end. To continue jamming it in or locking it, I'm just going to go this way. There we are.

Now just take your pliers, give your tie rod just a little wiggle, like this. You can see it moving down here. You want to try to get it as level as possible to the knuckle. It's got to be able to move around. That's what it's supposed to do, but I like to have it just about as level as possible to start. After that, it can do whatever it wants to do. So there we are. To finish up, all you would do is just put the wheel on, torque it up, drive it down the road. Oh, and an alignment.

All right, so we're going to take our wheel, roll it right over to our leg, lift with our abs, and put it up on here. We have our lug nuts ready. Going to grab my hubcap here so I can grab it nice and easy. Here go. Right up our leg, lift with our leg muscle/abs. Get that up there. Hubcap. Grab ourselves a few lug nuts here.

All right, so we got them all started. We're just going to bottom them out, and then we'll go ahead and torque them down. To bottom them out, we're going to go in a star pattern, and we'll do the same procedure for torquing them down.

Okay, friends, here we go. Let's get ready with our 21mm socket. We're going to torque down these lug nuts to 83 foot-pounds in a star pattern. Now, for safety's sake, let's just go around one more time. It doesn't cost us anything, doesn't hurt, and it's a small price to pay for a good amount of safety. There we are, all torqued up. Just make sure your brake's pumped up. I'm sure it is. Make sure you get an alignment, and go ahead down the road. Easy peasy.

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