How to Replace Ball Joint 2011-17 Toyota Camry

Hey, everyone. Sue here from 1A Auto and today we have a 2013 Toyota Camry in the shop and I'm going to show you how to replace a lower front ball joint. If you need any parts for your car, click on the link below and head on over to 1AAuto.com.

So take the tire off. You need a 19 millimeter socket. Take your tire off. Now, we're going to take the old cotter pin out of the lower ball joint 'cause we're going to have to discard that. The new ball joint will come with one and go from there. I just use a pair of cutters. See if I can get it to line up. We can make itself a little free in there. Sometimes there's a little ear you can grab from the other side. This one's going to be, it's probably been in their original equipment. Yeah, I got it to move. Good. Feel the other end with my hand. I can feel it moving. You'll see the other end now has a little bit more of a lip to it. I can just grab it with the cutters and then pull it out. Perfect. There you go.

The nuts on the spindle part of the balls are pretty good. So I can only fit a open end wrench on there. So I'm just going to give it a quick tap. See if I can get it to jilt itself a little free. Notice how I keep my hand on that. You take your hand off of it and try to hit that, the wrench could just bounce off and hit you. Let's go to the other side. There we go. So it's mostly the vibration of the hammer, not so much the effort of trying to spend the wrench around it. We'll get this off as far as we can go before it hits the axle and then I'll take the bolts off on the control arm side and we'll take a pickle fork because we're not going to reuse it so we can use a pickle fork and break that down.

I'm going to take these three bolts, two nuts and one bolt out. 17 millimeter socket and use my half inch breaker bar. You can use air tools if you have air tools at home. I'm going to show you if you don't have air tools how to do it and it can be relatively easy. Can see the pressure as the control arms going up. That's where the pressure point as the ball joint pushes it down. Then we get up pickle fork. I'll just pull down on this, get that out of the way. You can take a hammer actually before you get the pickle fork, if you hit right in here, you might be able to jilt that that free. All right, we'll hit that pickle fork go that way. This might not work. It might be the wrong size. There it go.

Now if you're reusing that ball joint, you want to try to not use the pickle fork 'cause you can rip the boot just like that. So if you reusing the ball joint and you need to take it out for some reason, I don't recommend doing it that way. In this case, we're replacing it, so we can just destroy it. Oh there we go.

So now on a Toyota, the axle nut or spindle nut is a special socket. It has to be a 12 point 30 millimeter. So you can, you have to order it or make sure you have one before you do a Toyota axle for the spindle nut. Let me take that off.

Set that aside and I'm going to spray a little bit penetrating spray in there, so that I can hopefully hammer that axle out of the knuckle. Hit the spindle part and get the CV axle shaft out.

So here we have our original factory ball joint for our Camry and the replacement from our TRQ line at 1A Auto. And it's nice. I like the pressed in studs, threaded rod, it's got the R on it just like the factory one to make sure you know that it's the right side lower ball joint. New boot of course spindle, new castle nut, and new mounting hardware. That's really nice. Has the same angle. If you need this part or any other part for your car, click on the link below and head on over to 1AAuto.com.

I'm going to put the new lower ball joints in. Now I think it's going to be easier for me to fish it up into the knuckle and then put it into the lower control arm. So I want this spindle piece turned in as far as I can that way. So I've got it at this angle so that way I can hopefully work this in. The vacuum plate, probably won't hurt to bend it a little bit. We'll just have to bend it back. There we go. Get that castle nut and put it back on.

Now I'm going to try to torque this down before I put the axle in, 'cause then I can use an actual socket. So the new nut on the ball joint is a 21 millimeter. The old one was a 19. now the torque specs for this is 91 foot pounds. So do I want to put, the leave the CV shaft in and tight and like I would if I was just doing the ball joint. You could, but at the same time you're not going to get 91 foot pounds out of that. So it's just as easy to take the axle mount out whether you're doing the knuckle bearing or not. Just take the axle nut out, slide it out. Helps you do the whole job probably a little easier. And you can actually use a socket take the old one out. So I'm going to be able to torque that now till 91 foot pounds.

So I'm going to tighten this lower ball joint castle nut. It's a 21 millimeter socket and I put my half inch breaker bar in there 'cause the torque is 91 foot pounds which was really high. And I'm going to use a pry bar and put it right through where the axle would go through. It's not going to do any damage to it and that way I can get some good leverage on this and torque this write down.

Let's see if the cotter pin lines up. So it's pretty close. I lucked out on that one. Now I'll just put that new cotter pin through. Grab my ... I'm going to pull the top one over. Cut off the excess. And then I'll spin this side around and I'll get this side over here.

Now we're clear to put the axle back through the center of the bearing, going up the spindles and at the same time I'm going to line up the lower ball joint to the control arm. There we go. Get a pry bar. With a pry bar I can pull down on the control arm.

We have the two do lock nuts. They've got the lock washers on them. It's got to reverse, little grooves in them that once it's torqued down, tightened it doesn't back off. And then our one bolt that goes through the platform. Make sure you start everything by hand so you don't cross thread it.

So we're going to tighten the lower bolt ball joint to control arm with the two nuts in the one bolt. The two nuts are an 18 millimeter socket. When torquing down the ball joint to the control arm, the manufacturer gives you two choices of replacement nuts and it's a wider nut or thinner nut. The thinner walled nut is 55 foot pounds. And the wider based nut is 68 foot pounds. We have the wider base here, so I'm going to go with 68. Put my 18 millimeter socket on there and torque this to a 68 foot pounds. And then this one bolt is a 15 millimeter socket.

So before we put our new axle nut on, apparently I hit it a little too hard. This is why you really should use a center punch, but sometimes you just use a hammer and I just knurled over the end thread just a hair. So I want to show you how to take care of that. I have a triangle file here, just a three sided file and I'm going to find that where it's flattened over. I'm going to put it right in that groove and I'm just going to file forward. And it just takes enough off of it so that the new thread will correct itself.

Now that we corrected out threads in the beginning here, we can put the new nut on. I'm going to use an air gun to get it down just before the hub because I have to torque this to the manufacturer's specs with a torque wrench. You don't want to over tighten it with an air gun cause that's a pressed in bearing and you'll actually compress the housing and the bearing will get wasted real fast. And you don't want to leave it too loose 'cause then the bearing has play and you'll end up defeating the whole point of it.

So in order to put enough torque on the spindle nut, I need you to stop the wheel from turning. So I'm taking my longest bar and I'm putting it through the lug nuts. I'm going to take my 12 point 30 millimeter socket.

Yeah. Now that tells me that when I used my air gun earlier, I didn't even come close to bottoming out, which makes me happy because I didn't want to. So bravo to me. I did a good job. Torque specs is 217 foot pounds.

So before you talk the axle nut, you want to make sure your car is still in neutral, not in park, because in park you're actually putting strain on the axle. Makes sense, and it goes into the gear section or the transmission. And 217 foot pounds can be too much and you can make actually do some gear damage, chipping gear. So make sure it's a neutral so that the pry bar takes the initial pull of the 217 foot pounds. Now take your lug nuts off so you can remount your tire.

Last step before you put your wheel on, you're going to take a punch and a hammer and push down on this. It's a little tin piece out here and it stops it from backing off. Just want it enough so it sits right in that groove and stops it from moving.

19 millimeter socket. I'm going to hand tighten all the lug nuts. Then I'll lower it down and torque it. I'm going to start at the bottom and I'm going to go in a star pattern and the wheel torque for this Camry is 76 foot pounds. Double check everything.

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