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Part Details
Our control arms are designed to be direct replacements for the original factory parts. They are 100% brand new and require no modifications for installation. No special tools are required because all of the bushings come pre-installed.
Our steering and suspension components are pre-greased and sealed for long life and do not require the extra maintenance typically required by greaseable versions.
Item Condition:
New
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WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Chromium (Hexavalent Compounds), which is known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov
Lifetime Warranty
This item is backed by our limited lifetime warranty. In the event that this item should fail due to manufacturing defects during intended use, we will replace the part free of charge. This warranty covers the cost of the part only.
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Hi, I'm Mike from 1AAuto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years! We're dedicated to delivering quality auto parts, expert customer service, and fast and free shipping, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. We've created thousands of videos to help you install our parts with confidence. That saves you time and money, so visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to be working with our 2006 Ford Explorer. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your vehicle's lower control arm. Our new part comes with a ball joint in it.
If you like video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you need this part for your truck, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1aauto.com.
Here are the items you'll need for this repair: full metric socket set, metric wrench set, ratchet, breaker bar, pry bar, hammer, rust penetrant, safety glasses, gloves, jack, jack stands
Using a 19mm socket and a breaker bar, loosen the lug nuts on your tire. Raise and support your vehicle. We're doing this on a lift to make it easier to show you what's going on, but this job can be done at home on a jack and jack stands. Finish removing your lug nuts. You should be able to do this by hand at this point. You can use a ratchet if you need to. You can then remove your wheel and tire.
It may be a good idea to apply some penetrating oil to whatever parts you're going to be working with. With a 16mm, put a 17mm wrench on the nut on the topside of your sway bar link and brace it against the frame of the vehicle. You can then use a 16mm socket and ratchet on the bottom to loosen it. The sway bar link on these vehicles is essentially a series of bushings and washers with a sleeve all held together by one long bolt, as opposed to being a one-piece unit like some other vehicles. You can see ours is pretty rough here, because there's usually not this much slack. That's actually what your bushing is supposed to look like on all four pieces, one on each side. You can see the old ones are worn down or cut there. It looks like they've actually fallen off over time. Once the nut's out, you can try to remove the bolt from the center of the sway bar link. This can be pretty difficult, so if it doesn't come out by hand, don't be afraid to get on there and give it a good hit with a hammer. The sway bar link will disassemble just like that when you pull it out, so just make sure you have all the old bushing material and all the old washers off of it.
Using a 24mm socket and ratchet, remove the bolt and the lower portion of the strut. This has a wing nut on it inside of the control arm that's going to rotate and jam up against the bottom, so you don't need to put a wrench on it. Just be ready to catch that when it does come out. The 24mm socket will loosen and remove the lower ball joint nut. Strike the side of the steering knuckle with a large hammer. Be sure to use this proper safety equipment. It should pop the ball joint free from the knuckle.
With a 24mm socket and ratchet, remove the 24mm nut on the rear of the lower control arm. This bolt is fixed in to the subframe. We'll loosen the nut until it's flush with the end of the bolt. Move the nut and slide that rear bolt out of your control arm. Using a 30mm axle socket and a breaker bar, loosen the nut on the front of the lower control arm. Once you get it moving, you'll probably need to brace the bolt side. That's going to be a 24mm wrench. Leave the nut flush with the end of the bolt so you can help tap it loose. Then you should be able to remove it by hand and pry your control arm down. Now at this point, as long as you have the lower ball joint released from the knuckle, you should be able to sneak everything out and remove your lower control arm from the vehicle.
Install the lower ball joint of your new lower control arm into the knuckle. You'll need to find the right angle to sneak this in at. Then just for safety, we'll start the new nut. Set the strut into the lower control arm and then line up the backs. Set the bolts into place and start the nuts. Now you could do this yourself with a pry bar, but to make things easier to line up, I'm going to have a helper push down on the spindle while we install the strut bolt. You may be able to use a pry bar to help line up that bottom bolt. You're going to want to send just the tip of the bolt through and install that flag nut on the backside by lining it up and trying to thread that strut bolt into it. Once you've got everything started, you can bring all your bolts down close before we preload the suspension and torque everything into place.
It's a 24mm socket and ratchet for the strut bolt. Again, we're just going to get that close for now. It's also a 24 on the backside of the rear control arm bolt. We'll then use the 24mm wrench on the bolt head and the 30mm socket and ratchet, this is usually an axle nut socket, on the backside of the front bolt. Torque the lower ball joint nut to 111 foot-pounds. Using a screw jack or a floor jack, put the weight of the vehicle onto it so the suspension is at ride height. This means when we torque down our bushings, everything will be in place with no preload. The strut bolt gets torqued to 248 foot pounds. We did need to rent a larger torque wrench to get these sizes, but it is still a 1/2" drive and still works with the sockets we already had. Using a 24mm wrench to hold the bolt and a 30mm socket and torque wrench, torque this to 296 foot-pounds. The nut on the rear control arm is also 24. That gets torqued to 148 foot-pounds.
Now you sort of need to build the sway bar link into the truck, so we'll start with a washer and then a bushing. We'll go up through the control arm, install a bushing with the tapered end down, followed by another washer, the sleeve, a washer with the cup end facing up, and a bushing with the tapered end facing up. We'll go through the sway bar, install another bushing, then install the washer and the nut and tighten your new hardware down. You'll want a 17mm wrench on the nut and a 16mm socket and ratchet on the bolt end. Just tighten that up until it compresses the bushings so you know that everything's nice and tight and there's no slop in there to make any noise when you go over bumps. Once that's down tight, you can lower the weight off of the screw jack or floor jack.
Reinstall the wheel and tire onto your hub. It's easiest to put a lug nut inside of the 19mm socket to start it onto the studs. Get all five of these down as tight as you can by hand, and then we'll torque the wheel once there's some weight on it. Lower the vehicle back down and put partial weight onto the wheel and tire. This means that you may have your jack or lift under the vehicle. Get the tire to touch and let the vehicle come down some without allowing it completely off of the lift or jack. Torque your lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds in a cross pattern.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
Tools used
Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years. We're dedicated to delivering quality auto parts, expert customer service, fast and free shipping, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. Visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the rear lower control arm. We show you on the passenger side. The driver's side is the same procedure on the 2006 Ford Explorer that we're working on. Hope you like the video. If you do, please click subscribe, check out all our other videos for Explorers plus lots of other makes and models of vehicles. Check out 1AAuto.com in the link in the description. All your parts needs, whether you're a car, truck, SUV, or whatever. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.
With the vehicle on the ground, take a 19 millimeter socket, or your tire iron, and loosen up your lug nuts. Raise and support your vehicle, you can use jack and jack stands; we are using a lift. Remove the lug nuts the rest of the way, and remove the wheel and tire.
Spray the top of the stabilizer link with some penetrating oil. Let it sit. There’s a 16 millimeter on the bottom for the stabilizer link, and 15 millimeter on top. The nuts usually come off pretty easy on these, but a lot of times the link inside is so rusted that this won't come apart, but we'll see what happens.
If this top bushing is stuck, with a good set of locking pliers, usually you can start twisting it, and lift it up and off. Then, we'll put the locking pliers on the bottom, and we'll just start to try to unlock each piece as we go. I'll put my 16 millimeter back on here. That bushing's free. Get the top bushing here. Top bushing's free. Now, we'll try the plastic sleeve.
This is usually where you run into some problems. Looks like everything's spinning at least. Take a lot of penetrating oil, and go right down from the top and let that sit for a while. We're pretty lucky, because ours seems to be coming apart. Most of the time, when the link goes bad, this shaft is broken anyways, and then things will be so rusty, what you'll end up doing – the easiest thing can be to just cut right through here with either a reciprocating saw or a torch. Ours, like I said, seems to be coming out. We'll put the nut on top. After we've let it soak for a while, we're just going to put the pliers back on there again, twist it around and hopefully that gets some of that penetrating oil to drop down in.
Now, we're using a driving pin. Up to this point, you can lock a set of pliers onto the upper part, and drive the link out.
These three bolts, one, two, three, are all 24mm. Spray the back of them. These two have nuts that you have to hold with a wrench. This one has a nut that has a bracket that holds it in place. Use a nice big breaker bar for leverage, and loosen them up. I’m taking the nuts off, but leaving the bolts in place, and support this trailing arm. We're on a lift, so I'm using a twist jack. If you had your vehicle on jack stands, use your floor jack. Once you have this out of it's nut, you kind of release the jack a little bit. That usually allows this to come out. We got to find the other sweet spot, get that out, then jack it back up, and that gets this all apart, and it might help to have a little hammer around. Pull that bolt out, control arm comes down, and then you can remove this bolt. Then the control arm comes off.
A lot of times what happens is on your control arm, this bushing goes bad or they just get rusted to a point where you have to replace them. Ours is still in good shape, so we are going to put it back in the vehicle. You'd want to make sure that you take this bolt with tab, put it into your new control arm, then put it in place.
It makes it a step easier to take your tire up and out of here, but if you just take the control arm, push it towards the front of the vehicle, push the bolt in place and through, and lift it up. Your longest bolt is the one for the strut. Just push the strut in. Bring the jack back out from the front control arm, put it under this one, raise it up. This one will kind of keep an idea of where your strut is.
Then you may need to raise it up more, or with just a little help from the hammer, put it through. Actually when I did that, this almost fell into place. Put some more pressure on the control arm. Tap the top of the knuckle down. You can see it comes through most of the way. Set the nut back on, and thread it through.
Then we'll put the other two nuts on preliminarily. We're going to just tighten them, but we don't want them seated yet. We want to raise it up into ride position before we tighten and torque them.
Bring the jack down, and move it out. Now you want to get your suspension jacked up into the ride position. Then we want to torque these to 203, 203, and 185 foot-pounds. We're going to let it back down, and just adjust the position so we can put our sway bar link in.
Here’s a new sway bar link from 1AAuto. You can see it's a little bit different from the original, but it's going to fit and function the same way. Put it up into place. I've already got a washer and bushing down here. I've got to put the next bushing with the shoulder facing towards the control arm, and then washer goes on there, and then the sleeve. I'm going to push this up through, and a washer like that. Again, shoulder facing up towards the sway bar.
I want the sway up. Put the link assembly in. With the back side of a socket, drive the whole shaft right up through. The shoulder goes down towards the sway bar. Washer on top. Start the nut on top. At this point, I can put some more pressure on my suspension, but not too much. The bolt and nut are 15 millimeter. I'll preliminarily tighten up the nut. Okay, with a torque wrench, tighten the nut to 22 foot-pounds. Remove your jack.
Reinstall your wheel and tire. Put the vehicle back on the ground. You want to tighten your lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds using a star pattern.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
