How to Diagnose and Replace a Bad Ball Joint

hey how's it going do these offers today not only I'm going to show you how you can properly diagnose a bad ball joint but also going to show you how you can replace it now before we go any further if you see any tools or products used in this video that pique your interest I put links to where you can buy them for cheap online in the description box so don't be afraid to click on them and check them out alright says you just saw this car makes a squeaking sound whenever you turn the wheels back and forth now interestingly enough that squeaking sound is not the most common symptom of a bad ball joint now some more common symptoms of that ball joints are going to be a clunking or a popping sound coming from your wheel when you drive over little potholes cars pulling to the right or to the left and if you drive on a bed Bulger long enough you'll have uneven tire wear now in order to verify that you indeed with a bad ball joint what you need to do is the first raise and support the sides and you can fix the bad ball joint on jack stands and next you want to grab you realize a 12 and 6 o'clock position and rock it back and forth and look for play see by rocking your wheel back and forth in those positions you put tension on your lure and if your car is equipped with one upper ball joint and if you do feel any play that means that you could potentially have either lower or upper bad ball joint well you'll need to visually verify that because if you have a bad wheel bearing you'll have the same play in your wheel and you can hopefully see there is no play in the lower ball joint to this car but we still hear that squeaky noise so what is the he'll see the way ball joints work is that in the center of it you have this shaft that's rounded towards the bottom this guy right here and this bottom end sits inside the housing and here's the housing for this ball joint now since both these two pieces are made out of metal and they cannot rub against each other for a long period of time what they put between these two is going to be some type of a plastic seal or bushing and in order to prolong the life of that bushing what they put inside of these ball joints is going to be some grease and in order to make sure that we stay in there that where the rubber boot comes in in so many words what I suspect has happened here is that rubber seal inside the ball joints has worn out and every time this ball joint is turning hi there when we turn our real you son to make a noise and if you look closely you can see a completely torn rubber boot and the grease that's badly contaminated with dirt dust and debris now you also have ball joints inside your inner and outer tie rods which work pretty much exactly the same way but the only ball joint that's rotating which would mean is the one I could potentially be making this noise while we turn our reel back and forth is going to be our lower or upper ball joint also now with that side raised off the ground and no load on that ball joint when we turn the wheel we don't hear the noise all right and after that let's get on to the repair procedure now so in order to replace of all joints you of course need a basic set of hand tools some wrenches would also help especially if they're ratcheting wrenches like B's with my logo on them oh yeah my own brand of ratcheting wrenches this will be available for sale hopefully within the next month or so through my website if you guys are interested but most important of all you're going to need a ball joint press like you see here all right first things first we remove our reel all right next we're going to move our brake caliper with a brake caliper bracket so we'll be removing these two bracket bolts one up top as you can see here another one lower on the bottom here's top one and here's the oil now before you take this bottom one and completely remove your bracket you wanna make sure you have something that you can risk this caliper bracket on so it's not dangling off the brake line like this all right since we're completely planning or removing the steering knuckle we're going to do next is to remove our outer tie rod in all right so first couple of shots of PB Blaster and next we'll remove our cotter pan there we go and next we'll remove our castle nut some more PB Blaster action alright so in order to detach our outer tie rod ends from our steering knuckle what we're going to need to do is grab ourselves a nice big hammer and whack it right here on the steering knuckle flag right here there we go and next since this car is equipped with ABS we're going to move our ABS sensor by removing these two bolts that you see attached to our steering knuckle here's the one up top and you're the one bottom and here's their ABS sensor there we go alright so next we're going to loosen the castle nut for lower ball joints so first we'll remove our cotter pin it is and next we're just going to loosen this castle Knight we are going to remove it completely yeah we're just going to back it out this much this is enough now we'll come up to our upper ball joint and control arms then you're going to remove this nut and then remove this bolt there we go and next if we're lucky we should be able to just hammer this out there we go or you might need to use a punch or whatever you have at your disposal to get it out once again some more PV blaster action right where upper ball joint goes through our steering knuckle and again some hammer action on the steering knuckle part area and then we come on the bottom and then more hammer action finally I took a while oh yeah now we can remove the lower ball joint castle nut and then remove our doing them so look at our lower ball joint so if we were to remove this we need to push this through our control arm so first we're going to remove the snap ring that's around it there we go what your I make some more PB Blaster action around the ball joint so in order to remove it we could use our ball joint press but it's much easier just to try to hammer it out just make sure you don't damage your control arm also if your lower control arm is not supported like it's the case in this case or your shock and also our stabilizer bar and Link make sure you put your jack underneath it so as you're hammering this wasn't moved at all right next we'll clean the area with some brake clean and next we go to our ball joint press find the right adapters so for this we're going to use this ring this is the one that's going to go against this housing on the bottom and then this is all it's going to go on the bottom portion of the press and we're going to get it on the bottom and try to push it up through this hole inside our control R so these are going to go like this from the bottom of the ball joint press and once we're sure it's centered it's going to go here I'm going to get another adapter and then we put our adapter here and start screwing this in it's going to push this through or lower controller there we go now I couldn't find the right adapter but luckily I have a large enough socket that I can use alright next by using our ratchet we're going to run this down you just want to make sure you go nice and slow just in case that thing starts binding you can back it out and try again it's kind of we got kind of hard way too quick I'm gonna actually back to stop take it look see you can see left side just coming up a little bit further than the right side but I don't think I have much of a choice and so I'll have to write adapters and this thing is just not going to go in super even I'm just going to see if I can force it through and then once it gets all the way to the top it will hopefully giving out on its own if not we'll figure something I'm sure all right time to break out the big gun alright so actually this thing did bind towards the top where I couldn't even push it with my air gun so what I did was use my jack and the adapters in a socket to support the ball joints from underneath then when the ball John was supported with the Jack came up here and tapped on this end where it was not going as high as the other side I tapped on the control arm side and push that down and now it's fairly even I should be able to use the press to get in there said away stop and pop alright we got it alright next we'll install our new snap ring like this alright next we'll install our grease fitting make sure it ends up facing somewhere that's going to be accessible later on alright so the rest of this going to be the reversible removal so I will get that on camera just make sure you sort it down to the proper torque specification for your cars legged model also make sure you use new cotter pins I'm just going to go ahead and put everything back together and the next shot you guys will see will be us testing you know turning the wheel back and forth see whether we fix our issue or not there you have it folks that's how you can properly diagnose and replace the bad lower ball joint so yeah if you liked this video do me a favor and share this video on your favorite social networks and also consider checking out either the related videos of which I've put these two on the title screen that you can click on there will also be links in the description box down below as well alright thanks for watching I'll see you guys next [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Ratchets And Wrenches

Views: 303,103

Keywords: Rathcets and Wrenches, ball joint replacement, ball joint noise, ball joint removal tool, ball joint separator, Ranger ball joint replacement, how to replace ball joint, how to check ball joints, how to remove ball joint from control arm, how to use a ball joint press tool, bad ball joint sound, bad ball joint symptoms, bad ball joint noise, control arm replacement, control arm bushing replacement, lower ball joint replacement, upper ball joint replacement, ford ranger

Id: vWo4FpVbFLQ

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2017