ABC Strut ball joint repair. The CAR WIZARD shows to fix ABC strut on '04 Mercedes SL500

welcome back to hoovy's garage the dumbest autumn wait a minute wrong channel is that the wrong channel magic mike yeah that's the rocket wrong channel okay welcome back to the wizard shop there we go here we have mrs swisher's r230 sl500 someone actually commented they wanted to see the ball joint procedure on the abc struts done we're going to show that today right after this any of you that have these with the abc suspension have noticed maybe a front-end clunk and you go over bumps it's there is a ball joint that connects the abc strut to the lower control arm and that's typically the culprit i've already done one but i want to show you what it looks like with a loose ball joint on the passenger side and we're going to actually replace that today but first i want to show you guys another project we're doing we're not going to do a in-depth video on it but this is a common issue as well and how you fix it you like my tablecloth mrs wizard it's great nice pink bubbles so we've been driving mrs wizard's so500 around for a while and it would go into limp mode that scared the crap out of me yeah it would shift really weird it it felt like the transmission's slipping it wasn't it was just like second or third gear and it was staying in that gear i scanned the codes and found out what was the problem it was a turbine sensor inside the transmission which is located on the conductor plate in order to fix this you have to remove the transmission pan and the valve body to get the conductor plate off the valve body and if you guys want to come over here i'll show you what we did so here's the valve body it has all these little solenoids that control gear changes it's basically what they do is control the transmission fluid flow so i've got the conductor plate just kind of sitting on there and all these solenoids go into each of these holes they're in order i don't want to mess them up magic mike took this out and i don't want to throw him for a loop but the sensors are right here in these little towers and if you turn it take this off and turn it upside down there they are we've already replaced them so i'll place it on this socket here in a minute on the older mercedes transmissions you could just buy a new conductor plate when you had issues with the turbine sensors or floats and there are different things you just buy the black plastic piece and put a new one on and you're done but in these model years the transmission control module is right here that's what this little electronic box is and it is hardwired into the conductor plate you cannot take this off and replace it so if you put another conductor plate on you're going to have to program it to that vehicle we don't want to do that that's too much trouble all we need to do is replace the sensor they actually sell a kit i got one on amazon actually it comes with these are the old sensors but it comes with two new sensors and a tool to remove them basically you have to scrape away the solder on these it's flexible this circuit board here once you scrape the solder away you can just fold the circuit the laminated circuit out of the way use this tool with a hammer and lightly tap it and it cuts the the seal around each sensor you pull the old ones out you glue in two new ones with epoxy just basically like they did the factory then you re-solder the pins and we'll put this back together magic mic will get it all back together this will solve the turbine sensor code with new sensors that's all it was one of these sensors was bad that's all it was it'll cause all that trouble this would be much cheaper than buying a whole conductor plate and having to reprogram the module we can be back in business now let's get to the ball joints [Music] in the previous video we did with mrs wizard sl500 we showed that these ball joints on the abc struts are bad just like this that's a lot of clunking noise when you're going down the road it's very annoying okay now you can see over here on the other side i've already replaced it with a brand new one let's push on it now no movement at all all nice and tight this is the brand new ball joint you really can't find these at your local parts store or fcp euro they really don't even sell these you have to go i actually got them from this company rebuild master tech that's where i actually found these i think there were seventy or eighty dollars a piece they're not too expensive but you're actually able to get these if you go through the right vendor so in your years when you work to the mercedes dealership you're telling me they wouldn't even do this as an option no they wouldn't what they do is they'd sell you a whole strat and on top of that they'd probably tell you oh you need two quarts of fluid and we need to bleed the system and they tried to sell you a whole service on top of it and it would get really expensive really quick so they would want to replace both struts to solve this problem exactly probably four or five grand easily because the struts are what 12 1500 bucks a piece just about then you got well in the dealership they're going to be probably way more than that they're going to charge you 140 150 an hour really high really fast when you can actually buy the ball joint is the only problem miss wizard doesn't have abc suspension problems she has a ball joint problem and as you've seen on the last video we did a rodeo mode and moved the car all around and it was a happy camper this is the old ball joint i actually had to cut the nose off to do this job and i'll show you why here in a minute let's go ahead and get started first thing we're going to do is remove the nut when you get the nut off don't throw in the trash don't toss it we i actually like to reuse these because the nut that comes with the new ball joints is actually a little smaller it still works but these are much stronger they got a large shoulder on them i would rather use these nuts so don't toss them we're going to reuse these the nylon that's inside for the nylock still is very tight if you put it on by hand and you can't put it on the whole way by hand that means it's still good put that right there for now now we need to separate the abc strut from the lower control arm you don't need to worry about damaging your old ball joint it already is damaged it's ruined you're not going to reuse it well maybe some of you would but i don't recommend it so we're going to tear the boot we're going to ruin this ball joint it doesn't matter so we're going to take this pickle fork and put it between the strut and the control arm [Music] there it goes now this is going to take some serious hitting with the hammer now you're not going to lightly tap it with a little claw hammer that you use to put nails in the wall you have to hit it pretty hard there we go now the strut can turn a little bit you don't want to flip it way around it can also move back and forth a little bit but it's pretty pretty tight so what i do is just kind of let it set on the control arm there there's no longer any spring or any kind of spring action holding the wheel so i can pick up the whole wheel with with my hands and move the whole thing so based on that fact we're not lifting the whole car i'm going to put a jack under the tire here the piece of wood this will hold the wheel up and give us access to the ball joint and that should do it that gives us a nice clean access to the ball joint you can see that thing is shot okay now it's time to get i have two different ball joint press tools that i use one ball joint kit is just your standard universal ball joint press tool the other one is a 220 230 211 ball joint surface kit made just for mercedes-benz i use that one to install the ball joint but i use the universal ball joint press to remove this one it's kind of a weird rigmarole of parts and pieces to make it work but it worked very well let's get this one out of here before we get too far i need to actually cut the nose of this off and the reason why is both of the ball joint presses i have are just not physically wide enough to fit the cup pieces that go on and the width of the the c clamp i guess as you call it the body of it it just won't work taking the ball joint out it will work putting it in but to take it off i just have to cut this off so i'll use my handy dandy angle grinder with no guard no face shield and i will cut it off okay so i've got the nose of it cut off which will make our job a lot easier we're going to use this ball joint press some of the rings spacers out of the kit and to remove it i actually found a socket just a standard impact socket that fits perfectly onto the old ball joint that can fit through the bore of the strut and push it all the way out works really well so i have one of the spacers that came with the ball joint press kit and it's exactly the diameter of the strut but yet the ball joint still fits in there there's not much room around this there's a very small edge that you're actually going to be pressing on and this fits just perfect i did have to grind the tip you can see right there with my where i'm rubbing it to fit where it pinches right up in here in the top just like so let's go ahead and get this set up okay now here's why i cut off the nose i can fit my socket right in see that with the nose there i'd be i don't think it would work let me get this set right here so i've got it on there nice and tight so you want to be sure that you're pushing on the ball joint so you on this side you want to be pushing on the strut lip not on the ball joint just on the lip you'll see when you look at it it's just a very small ring around it let's take a look over here and i'll show you as you can see there's a very small lip around that you use to press it out it just barely works very small so we're pushing on the center of the ball joint with this socket and holding it in place around the ring that i just showed you this is to remove it i'm going to use a my handy milwaukee impact to push it out now we're going to tighten that and push the ball joint out with our impact this this would only work with a heavy-duty half-inch drive milwaukee i don't think your little 3 8 impact is going to do this job i don't even think an air impact unless it's three quarter or one inch drive would do this but these things are super powerful let's go ahead and push it out [Music] okay it's normal for the pieces to follow when you're working with ball joints when it finally gets loose and all your little pieces fall it's going to happen and there's our old ball joint there it is the old junky piece of junk you can see that our socket is stuck in there because it's got the the rubber the boot kind of got wedged but it's no problem [Music] there's the boot now we have a nice clean removal of the ball joint we did not damage the abc strut it is we're going to get this cleaned up now what i'll do is just soak it with some brake cleaner and scotch bright green scotch brite pad get it nice and clean in there if you have rust and dirt and corrosion left behind in the little splines in here it'll make it fight you really hard putting the new one on it's already hard enough to put the new one on they go in very very tight okay i'll go ahead and coat the inside with a light coating of grease that helps to fight corrosion and it helps us to put the new one on a little easier trust me these go on so tight grease is not going to make them fall out so here's our new ball joint and it comes with a new nut and i mentioned that the the old nut is a better of quality you can see that the old one has a nice shoulder to it and then the new nut doesn't work i'm sure that the new one would work just fine but i really like the idea of this strong shoulder so i'm going to reuse the old nut so what we're going to do is place this into position and use our mercedes press to press it in let me wiggle it in there so it's tight this one's a gold color this is actually made for the mercedes 211 2230 it has all the special cups with a cut out made for that particular job it works perfectly for this because this cup has a hole through it you can see through there it fits perfectly over the abc strut without touching the ball joint itself it lets the ball joint sink inside of this cup without getting bound up so that goes there you want it to have a through hole so that the nose of this has somewhere to go and this side is solid and it fits perfectly on the back of the ball joint you don't want to push in the center of it you'll br that's just a stamped steel a cover it'll break the ball joint you want to push on the outer edge so that's what they look like set up go over the nose there we go make sure you got the ball joined in nice and straight so you don't wedge it or get it bound up so now as we tighten this down i can put my finger and touch the nose of the ball joint that's what you want okay like i said you can slightly turn these just you don't want to turn it too much but that way i can get my impact on that end so we're going to drive this thing in now when i put the other one in it went in extremely tight i would have to go a certain distance and let it sit for a minute and kind of ease up go a little bit further and then go a little bit further and it worked great but they go in really tight which is what you want you don't want it loose in there here we go now we'll just let it sit for a minute let it ease up we'll go at it again i'm not exactly sure why i have to do it this way but i think it's because it actually gets hot from this friction and starts to swell as if you let it cool down it starts going back in again until it gets hot it's really tight there we go and get it off of here so after you get it pressed in you do just like we did on this side you put it in you put the nut on and you're done i'm gonna skip some of that to save some time so it's not some huge video but you can press out the old ball joints and put new ones in and you put the nut on and you're back in business so we got those replaced no more clunking on the front end that'll take care of that and it didn't take a whole lot of money we're gonna let magic mike get the conductor plate and the valve body back together and get it back in the transmission and we'll kill two birds with one stone get all this taken care of for mrs wizard you can check my amazon affiliates link in the description below it'll have all these tools that i have just used here listed for sale and if you haven't hit the subscribe button i really recommend you do that now thanks for watching [Music] all right so what good does this the pink bubble wrap do that just keeps dirt from getting into the valve body it's a nice clean surface wow nothing special no it's nothing it just had that laying around yeah that's pretty

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 133,322

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, scotty kilmer, car repair, car maintenance, tavarish, Doug DeMuro, samcrac, vinwiki, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, SL500, mercedes, benz, ABC strut, ball joint, wrenching

Id: sI5y3tX03qs

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020