John here with RealTruck.com. Today we're going to show you how to install
a 4" lift kit from ReadyLIFT onto this 2011 GMC Sierra. This kit comes with everything we need to
do the front and rear lift on this truck. What we have here is we have our rear U-bolts,
our lift blocks for the rear. We have our front lift spacers, upper control
arms, our skid plate and also our blocks for our front differential. One of the really nice things about this lift
kit, not only does it come with the control arms with the ball joints already installed,
but also new polyurethane bushings to go in the ends of the control arms. Having everything ready to go, we're going
to go ahead and get started on the back of this truck. First thing we want to do once we get this
thing up in the air and get a tire off, is to make sure that we put some kind of a jack
stand or support or something underneath the rear differential because when we start taking
these U-bolts off, it's very important that you got something under here so this whole
thing don't just come crashing down on the floor. One of the things that you might have to do
in order to get your differential to drop far enough to get your block out and put your
regular block in, is to go ahead and pull your shock bolt loose here, so that way your
rear differential can extend down and that's what we're going to do now. We've got our factory block out. We're going to go ahead and put our new ReadyLIFT
block in. Something you want to make sure you pay attention
to. If you look at this block, if we hold so to
the bottom it's pretty much level. You can see that there's a taper here. Make sure when you put this block in that
this high end of this taper goes towards the back of your track, because if you do it the
other way, it's going to throw your angle off and you're going to have all kinds of
problems, so that's very important. Okay. Once your block's back in, then you can go
ahead and get your new U-bolts that come with your ReadyLIFT kit. Go ahead and put these back over. Now, make sure you get these back in the right
place. They just sit down in a little notch up here
a kind of a little hoop on the top of this plate. Put your nuts and your washers back onto your
U-bolts. Then once we get all these back on, we'll
go ahead and take this up. Make sure these are good and tight because
we don't want this coming loose and having our differential fall out of our truck because
that'll be no fun at all. Got these all back in. Got our new block in. Got everything tightened up. We're going to leave this shock off until
we've finished the other side because that'll help us to get this down on the other side
and make our job a little bit easier. Got our block and everything on the other
side. The only thing left to do is go ahead and
put our shocks on. We put the one on the other side already,
so we're going to go ahead and put this one back on. Folks that's it. That completes the installation of our ReadyLIFT
kit on the rear of our truck. We're going to go ahead and let our jack down
and we'll go get started on the front. We've got our wheels off, so we're all ready
to go to get started putting this front lift on here. The first thing we want to do is go ahead
and let the fun begin and take off this front debris cover. While we're here, and we've already got our
weapon of choice in hand, we're going to go ahead and take our front differential skid
plate off too and just get that out of the way. After we get our skid plates out of the way,
the next thing we want to do is come over on the sides. On both sides we're going to remove our brackets
that hold our ABS wire on. We'll go ahead and do that. Okay. We'll go over and do the one on the other
side. Don't throw these bolts out because you will
need these when you reinstall your new lift. The next thing we want to do is remove our
sway bar links. Remember how these come apart because there's
a specific way that these go back together. What I recommend is to go ahead and pull your
bolt and leave it all together. Pull your link out, which you might have to
pry on it a little bit to get it to come out of there. Make sure then you take your . . . the same
way it came off, just slide it back together real quick. That way you'll know how to put it back on
when you replace that. The best way to get these up and out of here,
they make a tool called a pickle fork that you can put in here, drive it in with your
hammer. Pops these off but a lot of times it'll tear
up these rubber bushings so I recommend just taking your hammer and hit this right here
really good, and that'll pop out, just like so. Then we'll go ahead and do the one on the
other side. Got our tie rod ends loose. Next thing we're going to do is we're going
to go ahead and remove our lower strut mount bolts. We've got our differential all prepped and
now we're prepping the truck to put stuff back. We've got one more thing we've got to take
off. We have to take this rear differential mount
off or brake differential mount off. We'll have to get these bolt studs out of
here. We've got our passenger side differential
mount out. Now, what we need to do is we need to take
these bolts that are pressed in out of here. Normally if you clamp this up in a vice and
driver mount, if you don't have a vice another thing that works is take and get yourself
a big socket that actually fits around the head of the bolt here. Then just put it down on your table and just
put the head of the bolt down inside there. Make sure, when you drive these out, that
you go ahead and attach the nuts that came off back to it. You want to get them flush. That's so we don't damage the threads or mushroom
the end of the bolt, so that we can't get our nuts back on here. Next thing we want to do is we want to go
ahead and start to . . . We have our blocks, we want to go ahead and start mounting these
up on the truck. What we want to do at this point, go ahead
and reinstall this back into the truck. Then we're going to attach our spacers to
it using our hex-head bolts. Those will actually run through the spacers
and through where we just knocked those bolts out of. We've got everything all prepped ready to
go back together. We have our spacer blocks and we're wondering,
"Okay, which side does which one go in?" The easiest way to tell the difference is,
other than the obvious size difference, is that this one has an indent in it. It's designed to go back on the driver's side
of the vehicle. There's a bump if you look at your mounting
bracket up there, you can see a bump sticking down. It goes right into that cut out. This one for the passenger's side obviously
is bigger, wider and there's no indent in it. We're ready to go ahead and put this back
up in the truck, so we know which ones go where. When reinstalling these, or installing these,
make sure that you have the biggest part of it towards the front of your pickup. You'll take your hex-head bolts, put those
through. Up through where we knocked those studs out
there, and you're going to reuse the factory nuts that were on those studs to attach these. The two longer bolts are for the one on the
passenger's side. Okay. We've got that up there in place. We'll go ahead and tighten it up. We've got this one attached. We'll go do the other one on the driver's
side and we'll get ready to put our differential back. Guys, remember that notch that I was telling
you about. Right here is the nut that sticks down. It's going to slide into that notch. We'll go ahead and put our mounting bolts
in. Now on this side, you don't have to use any
type of nuts on the other side. It's designed to screw right into the factory
differential mount. We've got our differential going back up in. One of the things that we want to go ahead
and do now as we're putting it back in, is go ahead and reattach our wire that we had
taken off up here on the top and get that reattached. Also our vent tube hose, we want to go ahead
and reattach that while we've got it down here where we can actually reach everything
pretty decent. Once you get it up in there, it'll make it
a lot more difficult to put everything back on. Okay. Got that. We'll go ahead and continue to push this up
into place. Got our differential back up in here, basically
in place with maybe a little bit more jockeying around to get our bolts started. Right here, is where our cross member goes
across here. This is the spot where we had to grind down
our differential. Looks like on this one maybe we could have
taken maybe just a little bit more off, give us some more space, but it'll still be fine
just the way it is. You can see now the reason why you've got
to grind that down, is so that it'll slide over the top of this mounting bracket for
the cross member. Let's go ahead and get this thing bolted in
here, and go from there. The other side, the driver's side of the differential
will attach with the factory bolts that you took out. This side, if you remember, we had studs in
there that we knocked out to attach our blocks. In the kit, you'll find these bolts in a little
package that come with the lock washer and a big flat washer. These are the bolts that you use to attach
this side to the block. Got everything all mounted back up in here
now. We can go ahead and on this side get our vent
hose reattached. This is going to take a little bit of work,
guys to reattach this because you got to get up in here to get to it. You're going to have to stretch it a little
bit because, of course, we brought our differential down lower. We'll get this reattached and we'll reattach
our differential solenoid wire. Get into place. It's all up in there. Now we're going to go ahead and put our cross
member back in and continue on from there. We got our cross member back in. Next thing we're going to do is put our upper
control arms in. Before we do that, we're going to go ahead
and install our bushings, and these actually aren't too tough to install. All we got to do is take them apart. They come put together like this, just pull
them apart and set them out. What I usually do is I'll just take the control
arm, leave the bushing like it is. Put it down on there and just, kind of, slide
it, wiggle it back and forth, a little pressure on it and boom that ones in. Do the other side of it. Now, on this side you can actually take a
hammer and just tap it down. Pretty easy peasy stuff there. We're going to go ahead and we'll do the other
side of this control arm, and we'll do the other control arm and then we'll start putting
them in the truck. We've got our bushings in. The next thing we want to do is go ahead and
install our grease zerts that come with the kit. These go in the holes in the end of our control
arm here. Spin it in. Take a three-eighths inch wrench, tighten
it down. On these particular ones, what I like to do
is I get them turned so that way they're facing up when you've got it down like this, so when
it's installed in the vehicle, they're facing out. Makes it easier to get grease in them without
having to fight with them too much. Okay. We got this reattached. However, remember we marked these when we
took them off. What we want to do is go ahead and get our
wrench and our impact to get ready to tighten these down, but when we do that, we want to
readjust them so that our marks that we put on them are all lined up, all the way across. That should have us pretty close on our caster
and camber alignment adjustment. We'll go ahead and I'll go put the one on
the other side. Then we'll come back and we'll start putting
all this stuff here back together. Got our control arms back on. Got them all set pretty close to our original
alignment. Now it's time to go ahead and put our spacers
onto our struts. What we're just going to do is we're just
going to take the spacer that comes with our ReadyLIFT kit and we're going to attach it
onto the top of our strut using the nuts that we'd taken off earlier to remove the struts
from the truck. If you happen to get these and you start to
put them on and for some reason they don't fit because you're looking at it and going,
"These aren't lining up." You may have to turn them until you find the
spot that they fit because they're offset. Okay. Keep in mind that just the same way that this
was offset when we put that in, this will be offset too. However, a good little trick is that down
here on the bottom where it bolts on, you're either going to have it in the right position,
or you just need to flip it around, line those back up and that should put it in the right
position. Let's get the bolts, bolt this thing up and
get ready to do the other side. What we're going to do to make this a little
bit easier for us, we're just going to get these started down here. We'll put the bottom ones on and then we'll
let the truck down and tighten up the top ones the way we took them off, basically. We put our lower strut bolts in. One of the things we got to do for this, because
everything's going to be at a different level and a different rate is the spacer that we
took out of here earlier, we're going to leave it out, and also the clips that were on here,
that our bolt used to go up from the bottom and screw through, we're going to take those
off because we're going to use these new bolts that come with our ReadyLIFT kit. We're going to put them in from the top and
drop them down and then we have the new nuts and washers to go on the bottom as well. We got our new bolts in, with our nuts and
washers on them. We'll go ahead and tighten this side up. You do the same thing on the other side. Then we'll start putting all this stuff over
here back together. Got our struts all back in. Next step is to go ahead and reconnect our
upper control arm to our steering knuckle. One of the problems that you run into sometimes
when you put these spacers in, is trying to get this spring compressed so that you can
get the steering knuckle reattached to your upper control arm to your ball joint. One way of doing that, it's not necessarily
the best way, but it's not the worst way either, is to put a jack stand underneath your lower
control arm, let the truck down on to the jack stand. Now, I don't know, it depends on whether you're
using a hoist like we do here in the shop, or if you got it on a jack. Whichever way then you can utilize the truck's
own weight to actually push this whole assembly up to where it'll meet up with your upper
ball joint and allow you to get the stem through and reattach the nut. Once that's done, then it's pretty much smooth
sailing. We've got our upper control arm reattached
to our steering knuckle. Next thing to do is just start putting back
our brackets and reattaching them. Get our axle reattached to our front differential
and to go from there. We have our new skid plate that helps protect
our differential, especially seeings how it's hanging down a little lower now, we need something
pretty stout under here. It comes with new self tapping bolts that
you use to install it. We're just going to put it up in there and
get this thing done. There you have it. This completes our install of the regular
4" lift kit on our GMC Sierra. The only thing to do now is to take this thing
down the road and see how it rides. Until next time, happy motoring.
