How to Replace a Ball Joint (in depth, ultimate guide)

hey guys chrisfix here today we're gonna change out the ball joint specifically the lower ball joint on my 2001 Mazda B 3000 this procedure is gonna be the same for most vehicles with lower ball joints make sure your ball joint is a pressable ball joint sometimes ball joints are permanently pressed from the factory so you have to replace the whole control arm with the ball joint in it the lower ball joint on my truck is serviceable meanwhile the upper ball joint is not you actually have to buy the whole control arm with the ball joint in it already and replace the whole thing which I'll also be doing but in a different video here's everything I use for the job over here super-important you need a ball joint press I rented this for free from Advance Auto you could rent it from any major auto parts store you're gonna end up needing some type of hammer a couple of different size wrenches a breaker bar pliers and needle nose pliers is definitely helpful ratchet different size sockets and extensions threadlocker a grease gun some penetrating fluid and a torque wrench to torque everything also I have a list of all the torques that are going to be in description below you could check them out also can't forget about the ball joint here's the ball joint model that I got from my truck I want to thank auto parts warehouse for sending this to me and now let's go install it in the truck this is going to be the long in-depth video where I go into a lot of detail if you want to see a shorter overview video the link is in the description below before we lift the truck up we're gonna have to take this cover off and get to the axle nut in here and we're gonna take the axle nut off it's a thirty two millimeter axle nut so just use your screwdriver flat-head screwdriver right here and unscrew these three bolts on the outside of this cover to get this cover off this cover will just pop off and then there's your axle nut get a little penetrating fluid in there that'll help you out when you're taking this off in my 32 millimeter suck it you're gonna need a lot of torque so use a breaker bar a pneumatic impact wrench would be a lot easier but I'm showing you that you can get this job done with basic hand tools before jacking the car up make sure you take your lug nuts off good the axle nuts off and I love nuts are loose let's lift the car I have jack stands plus my jack supporting the truck and the rear wheels are blocked off always give your car a shake to ensure that stable and safe to work on while it's lifted off the ground and now we could begin to get this job done we're gonna unbolt the caliper and we're gonna move it to the side we're gonna unbolt the upper control arm from the knuckle and the lower control arm from the knuckle my goal is to not remove the tie rod and keep it connected so then this will all just move off to the side and then I'll have access to that ball joint right there be able to press it out I'm gonna spray all the nuts and bolts we will need to remove with the penetrating fluid spray the lower bowl drink we'll have to press this out later spray the lower and upper caliper bracket bolts also spray the upper control arm nut and bolt and don't forget the lower control arm nut now we'll remove the caliper by taking off the caliper bracket bolts so I'm going to use a 15 millimeter with a little bit of an extension on it and then I'm gonna attach a breaker bar to this and once that bolt is broke we could use a regular ratchet good now I'll do the same for the bottom bolt except I won't need the extension use the breaker bar break the bolt your ratchet finish it up other bolts out get some type of bucket and what this is gonna do is when the caliper comes off because it's almost ready to come off you could rest it right down on the bucket you don't want your brake caliper to be hanging by the brake line cuz that's how you damage your brake line and you can see brake line is still loose and this has a nice spot to sit which is out of my way and so you don't lose the bolts just put the bolts right into the caliper bracket so now we will remove the nut on the lower control arm bulger first step remove this cotter pin I'm using a needlenose pliers all you have to do is get these straight enough that you can pull them out this nut is a fifteen sixteenths we'll get the breaker bar on it and break it loose got the castle lid off so now we're gonna take off the upper control arm ball joint bolt that connects the ball joint to the knuckle it's 15 millimeter you just get your ratchet on one side and our wrench on the other keep the bolt & nut together so now I'll get a crowbar up underneath the control arm and against the frame so I could lift it up as I lift this is gonna pop out I spread a bunch of penetrating oil in here too and let it sit so this makes it nice and easy I know this is gonna come out pretty easy but if it doesn't you just put a piece of wood on your knuckle and you get a hammer and your Emer down as you lift up on the crowbar but I don't have to do that I just have to lift and that's gonna come right out with this out you want to make sure that the knuckle isn't pulling on anything you can see there's some tension on this ABS wire not too much but I'm gonna move around the knuckle so I'm just gonna loosen it up a little bit now I have more wiggle room now we're gonna remove the lower ball joint but before we do that I'm putting a bucket over here and what that's gonna do is this allow me to take this and rest it on there just like what we did with the brake calipers now the axle should come right out keep the axle in the car because then your differential fluids start coming out if you try pulling this out so now you might want to try to get some bungee cord or something and get the axle out of the way I have the axle bungee corded up so we have plenty of access to our lower ball joint now let's get working to press this out I'm gonna just spray down the area with some brake clean and then you see what we have to work with we have to get this snap ring out they make a special pliers that you could use but you could also use just a regular needle nose pliers just in case you don't have the snap ring pliers here's what snap ring pliers look like you can see when you press on the pliers it opens it up instead of closes it but because many people might not have these types of pliers but most people have needlenose pliers I'm gonna use needle nose pliers to show you that it'll work so as you do this what you want to do is break the seal a little bit because gonna be a little bit tough to get off now that the snap rings off we could start pressing so here's the ball joint press that we have I have the new ball joint so that's how we're gonna figure out what size we're gonna use I'm gonna try to use one with an opening so that you guys can see what's going on but pretty much you want to make sure that the whole ball joint will fit in here so what's gonna happen is you're gonna press the ball joint and it's gonna fall right into this so there's the bottom of the ball joint you can see this fits around it so it's not touching the ball joint it's just leaning against control arm to see how to use a ball joint press in depth check out my other video with the link in the description below I'm just gonna tighten this down onto the top of the ball joint when I try to get it centered that is pressing on the top of the ball joint the ball joint is gonna pop downwards now if you have an impact wrench that would be perfect for this because then you zum-zum done I'm gonna use regular tools so I'm just gonna use a breaker bar and the socket that goes over this this uses a 7/8 socket and we're gonna be tightening it and that ball joint is out before you put the new ball joint in just use some bright clean and you're gonna clean out where the ball joints it's so this is how I have the lower ball joint set up to get pushed in you can see here's the lower ball joint and then here's this round piece that fits exactly on this seat right here and then in order to push on this piece we need a piece on the bottom so now we're gonna use one of these at the top you can see this piece fits over it and that's gonna go on here I want to make sure there's enough clearance from here down because you're gonna have to use this upside down compared to what you're doing before on the ball joint itself it says mount inward so we want to put this on the inside of the car so like that our ball joint make sure the inside is facing that way get that in there put our cap on right here make sure it's centered good snug down because this is so close to the ground there's no way I could get a breaker bar in here so I'm using a 7/8 wrench but when I have it in here with one wrench it's really hard to turn so I've showed you guys this before what you do is you take another wrench like that and now you just extended your wrenches you press this until you can't turn your wrenches anymore and then we'll go check so we're just lower the ball joint is pressed perfectly so right as there starts to get too much resistance you know the ball joint is starting to seat so you should check it out and that split ring is going to fit on just right when we took this off it was facing this direction so I'm going to put it back on in this direction again I'm using regular needlenose pliers just to show you that it's possible with the regular common tools now I'm gonna put the grease fitting on the top using a 10 millimeter simply screw it in by hand first and then tighten it you don't want to over tighten this so now that's getting tight you always want this to face away so that you could get a grease gun in here I'm gonna angle it just a little bit to the rear so I could get a grease gun just by turning the steering wheel so you saw I painted the lower control arm I also painted the knuckle I go a little bit overboard sometimes that's just how I like to do it make sure everything is rust free and looks good if you want to now's a good time to put some anti-seize on the threads here I'm not going to because I had no problem taking this off so now we have to try to get this lower control arm ball joint stud and get it into the lower part of the knuckle and once you get it on get your castle nut and get screwed on just a little bit so that you can let go of the control arm I have that hand tightened before I tighten that all the way I want to try to get this in this ball joint is no good needs to be replaced as well that video being the link in description below to give me a hand I'm using a jack and the jack is gonna Jack the whole knuckle up for me so then I could get this right where it needs to be with the control arm so then just lift up the control arm slide the knuckle in just using a rubber mallet you really don't have to hit it hard good to see if the upper control arm is completely in just go and look at the hole in here and you can see it's completely clear so now I'm gonna put the bolt in so now that the red is sticking through I'm gonna put the nut on okay once you get that on there tight torque it down to thirty five to forty six foot-pounds I'm gonna use forty three it's on the upper end of the scale so 43 foot-pounds good now we could tighten the nut to the lower ball joint gonna hand tighten this the rest of the way up what we're gonna want to do is tighten this down to 82 to 113 foot-pounds in that range that's the range they give us I'll do a hundred make an even hundred foot-pounds and then we'll put the cotter pin in you don't want to back this off so if you miss the hole that you can see right there then you just tighten it some more the castle nut that's on the lower control arm ball joint is 27 millimeters this is 28 millimeters and I don't want to round it so a trick that you could do you just get a paper towel and you put it on the inside and that'll give you an extra snug fit unfortunately I have 28 millimeter not 27 so this will have to do okay torque that to a hundred foot-pounds let's go see where the cotter pin hole is it looks like that hole is just about there I'm gonna try to fit the cotter pin in and see if it's good enough good it'll make it right through and then you take your needlenose pliers and you bend each side of the cotter pin around the nut just like that so it doesn't move anywhere and now we're done with that so let's get the caliper back on so you can see these caliper bolts have red loctite on them that's the stuff that's really tough to get off if you want you could use some removable Loctite that's what i'm gonna use just add a little bit like so with the calliper on but not pushed all the way back I'm gonna find the area where I need to put the bolt and I'll put the bolt in and the reason I'll do that is because this could be tough to a line now I could see where I need to get aligned you can see that's perfect right there so I'll just tighten it a little bit so that it's in the caliper bracket now I'm just gonna tighten it a little bit more so that's not gonna go anywhere don't tighten it all the way because we still need to align the bottom corner the bottom caliper bolt will align a lot easier I'll snug it and then I have to get torqued the caliper mount bolts get tore up to 85 foot-pounds that was the top one and that was the bottom one before we put the car in the ground and tighten the axle nut remember to put your abs sensor line back in told her so it doesn't move around with everything assembled now I'll grease the lower ball joint get some grease in there it's already pre-greased so you're just gonna need a little bit extra good so we're on our final steps here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get some threadlocker for the axle nut and I'm gonna just put a little bit of this removable threadlocker just a little bit in there and that'll just help secure it because there's a lot of vibrations that go through this this is gonna have to get torqued down but before we do that we'll just hand tighten it and then we'll put the wheel on with all the lugs Titan will drop the truck your lug nuts get torqued to 100 foot pounds your axle nut gets torqued to 162 to 205 foot-pounds okay that's nice and tight and now just get the lug nuts and we are done that's how you change out one of these lower ball joints if this video was helpful give it a thumbs up also consider subscribing publish how-to videos weekly and answer all the questions or comments you guys leave below on the screen will be some videos popping up you could click on the screen or you could click on the links in the description for those videos if you use Facebook or Twitter check out the links in description below for the chrisfix Facebook and Twitter pages and finally I want to thank auto parts warehouse for sending me a ball joint so I could install it on my truck the link to the ball joint that I installed is in the description below

Channel: ChrisFix

Views: 2,017,968

Keywords: Replacing Lower Control Arm/Ball Joint, Ball Joint Replacement, Lower Ball Joint, Lower Control Arm Ball Joint, Ford Lower Ball Joint Replacement, Pressing a ball joint, Ball Joint Removal, Replace worn ball joints, Squeaky Ball Joint Replacement, how to replace front lower ball joints, front ball joint replacement, 4x4 ball joint replacement, ford ranger ball joint replacement, how to replace ball joints on a ford ranger, how to replace ball joints on a Mazda b3000

Id: ZztbAShnlxw

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Tue May 27 2014