How to Replace Front Driver Side CV Axle 2003-07 Honda Accord

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on 2007 Honda Accord. We're going to be doing a left front axle. It's going to be a fairly easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it, so if you need any parts you can always check us out 1AAuto.com thanks.

I've got the majority of the weight of the vehicle up off the ground right now. I set it up on our lift on the contact points. It's nice and safe. It can't go anywhere. I have the wheel just barely touching the ground so that when I'm loosening our lug nuts, the wheel won't be able to spin. All right. But I don't want all the way to the lyrical on there, I just want a little bit, just enough to hold it. I'm going to turn these to the left with my 19mm socket. I'm just breaking them free. Then we'll remove them. Once we get it up in the air. There we are. Now we can move along.

Now I'm going to continue taking off these lug nuts. If you have an air gun, you can go ahead and do that, it might be a little quicker. Essentially, just get off all your lug nuts and then you can move on to the next step. I'm going to take off this last lug nut. I'm holding my wheel. There it is. Take the wheel off. We'll set it aside.

All right, so our next step, we're going to analyze our situation. What we're going to have to do is we're going to have to take off this nut right here. This is the axle nut. That's going to come at some point. The knuckle, we're going to relieve this nut right here. It's going to let the knuckle come down, so that'll put pressure here if we don't have this nut off. Also, it'll put a tug on this hose and your ABS wire if you're not careful. We're just going to be preemptive and make sure that we don't hurt these at all, and all I'm going to do is I'm going to remove them from the knuckle. 10mm, 10mm, 10mm, 10mm, okay. If you have access to an air gun you can use that, or if you have a ratchet use that, but it's a 10mm.

There we are. That's going to give us plenty of slack for when this comes down. Perfect. Get this bolt out of here. Come around the back side, there's a 10 right here, right about here on the inside there. That relieves that. If you want a little bit more slack you can go ahead and do this one. Okay, now we've got plenty of slack. We got the bolt that came through this side, and we've got the nut that one right there, and then of course two bolts over there.

Okay, so next what we're going to remove is this right here. This is a bolt that goes through this. This is the lower part of your struck by the way through the control arm bushing, and then through the other part of the lower part of your strut, and then there's a nut on the backside which is also a 17. I'm just going to take my 17mm wrench. I'm going to hold the bolt head. When you use my air gun on the other side, you can use a ratchet if you want, 17, and I'm going to blast it in reverse or to the left. There we are, get that off of there.

I'm just going to take this nut that we just took off. I'm just going to start it back on a few threads, give it a few good threads, and then I'm going to take my hammer and I'm just going to give it a couple bonks and try to drive the bolt out. Once it moves freely, then I can go ahead and use a chisel and put it out the rest of the way. Here we go. Got my 17mm nut on there. I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks with my hammer. There we are. It's pushing the bolt through. Very good. Did what I asked it to do. I'm just going to grab my 17 again. Get this nut back off. The reason for putting on the nut when I did that was just so I didn't munge up the threads. That'll become an issue. So if it was frozen in there, you'd have to worry about it. Where it's not, I'm not really very worried about it. Just do that.

I've got my chisel. This is going to come out the other end, so you want to make sure that you know you don't have anything down there that might get hurt. Like If you're working on the ground, you might have your face under there. There we are. There's our bolt. I'm just going to set this aside.

The next thing that I want to do is I want to carefully try to pry between here and here. I just want to pull this part of the lower strut away just so I can get a swivel socket on there, and I want to try to take this nut off the sway bar link, and then I'm going to push the sway bar link out of the way and that should give us a little bit of throw with the lower control arm once we get the upper off here. Okay? Let's see if this works to our advantage. Perfect. I should be able to get in there. Let's take a look at what we got.

I've got a 15mm swivel, it's going to be like this. Once again, you can use a ratchet if you want. There we are. A ratchet might be a little bit harder than an air gun, so take that into consideration. If you look right inside there, you can see that there's like an Allen head key, so if you needed to and you were struggling trying to get this nut off and it's just spinning this shaft right here, because that's what they do, they spin, it's just a ball and socket in there. You would hold that and then use a wrench to turn this off. Okay? 15mm to get that off. This is out of our way now. Now we can move ahead.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this axle nut right here, and then I'm going to remove this right here, and we should be able to swing this down far enough. If we can't get far enough down, we'll just remove this right here, which is your outer tie rod nut, and then we should definitely have enough room to be able to swing this down. We'll try to get the axle out and out on the other end after that.

Here's our axle nut. We're going to use a 32mm socket. We're going to turn it counterclockwise to remove it. There it is. Okay. Let's see if we can push in the axle. We can't. There's multiple options we can do here. Firstly, you're going to spray it obviously with some kind of penetrate inside there. Try to get it worked in. Okay. If you have a center punch, maybe like an air chisel with a center punch, you can try to go right in there and that'll help push it through. If you don't have access to something like that, I would just go ahead and I'd take my nut and I would, I'm going to turn it to the left a little bit to get it started, but put it back on so that it's pretty much flush. Pretty close. Then I'm just going to hit this with my hammer and bonk it through enough to break it free. Okay?

First step, like I said, we're going to put a little penetrant in there. I have access to an air chisel, so I'm going to go ahead and do that, but if you don't, just make sure that you use your old nut, you put it on there, because once you peen this over, you're going to have a real hard time dealing with that. Not that it's really too big of an issue because we're going to be replacing the axle anyway, but if you weren't replacing the axle and you were just doing the bearing or whatever your job might be for a different situation, you don't want to peen it over. Replacing the axle, I guess do whatever you want.

I'm going to go ahead with my air chisel. Of course I'm wearing hand protection and eye protection. Safety first, number one concern here at 1A Auto. I'm just going to drive this through. Perfect. We don't want to go too much further than that because at this point we're going to be contracting the axle. Once it gets to the full point of being contracted, it's going to want to keep pushing and where's it going to go? Into the transmission? Okay? Let's not break any transmission parts today. That's a story for another day, not today.

I'm going to get this cotter pin out of here ,and then I'm going to take this nut off right here, and then we're going to try to bring this down. Like I said, if it doesn't come down far enough that I can pull it down and get the axle out, I might have to take off the outer tire rod nut. We'll see. Let's do as little as possible though. Here's our cotter pin, okay? It's just this little a pin, really. I'll show you what it looks like in a second here.

All I'm going to do, I'm going to take the little ears, I'm going to try to bend them down. Let's see if I can get it. There we are. Okay. Just going to work it around. I can see this and moving right there, so that means that the cotter pin is ready to come out, so that's nice. Now I want to try to straighten out those little years as much as possible and then I want to grab this end. Just pull it out. I like to grab it and then pry up against things if use cutters, it's usually pretty good. Also, if you have access to new cotter pins, it's always a good idea to have a new one just in case something like that happens. They get pretty rusted and they break. It is what it is, so I'll just replace that. Just going to get all these right out of here. Okay.

Now I want to get my socket on there. Let's see what size it is. 17. okay. I've got a swivel, I've got my air gun, you can use your ratchet. You do you, booboo. Eyeglasses on. Here we are. Here's our castle nut. Okay. I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to start back on there a little bit. I'm going to grab my hammer. I'm going to hit right here on the knuckle. I'm going to be careful not to break my boot, I don't want to pinch that in any way, and I don't really want to hit on the control arm so much as just the knuckle itself, okay? And if you can avoid hitting the nut and or the stud under there, that would be wonderful.

I've got my big fabulous hammer. I'm going to try to whack just on the knuckle here like I said, trying not to hit the control arm, the boot, this, really anything, right? Maybe you got your cable up here. I mean obviously you'd see that, but whatever. Just make sure it's out of the way, okay? Try to hit right here and we're going to hopefully break this free. Once it falls down and hits this nut then we can stop hitting it because it's broken free, and we'll move along, okay? There we are. Grab my control arm. Just pull it down. Okay.

Cool. We are cruising looking good. Now we just need to get our axle the rest of the way out of the wheel bearing here. Now that I've got this down quite a bit, we've still got plenty of slack on everything, right, because we don't have these attached. Imagine if we did, right? We're ripping things. We'll just try to drive the axle the rest of the way out of the bearing and once we do that we should be able to slide it down and out of the little forkey end of the strut assembly, and then once it's out of there, we'll pop it out of the transmission.

Here we go. I've got my air chisel again, my safety glasses, of course. I'm going to continue driving this axle up and out of the bearing. That's pretty good. Let's see if it gave us enough. Very nice. This car is loving me today. Perfect. Get that out of the way. Okay. Now I'm going to lift the vehicle up a little bit higher. I'm going to get under there and I'm going to try to separate the axle from the transmission. It'll pop out and then it'll just come right out this way. Okay?

Our quality tool set that we have from 1A Auto comes with two different types of forks. We've got one that's angled and we've got one like this. Sometimes you'll get an axle that gives you a lot of space where you have to have a spacer, that would be what this one would be, and then you just drive this one up in between, and that'll help force the axle out from in between the transmission in the axle itself, I guess. It'll help drive the axle out we'll say, okay? For this application, all I need is the one, the angled one. Okay, so I'm going to use this and I'm going to use my hammer. I'm going to try to get right up in here. This is the axle and this is the super expensive transmission, so we're going to be very careful not to damage this. We don't really care so much about the axle, right? Because, well, we're replacing it. I'm just going to try and get this in between the axle and the transmission and I'm going to try to break it free. I'm going to try to pry now. Okay.

You can see there's a little bit of a gap there. That's good news. Now I'm going to try to pull the axle out. Okay. You can continue with the same thing if you want to, you could even use the the wider one at this point. Just get it in there. Okay? Now we'll remove our axle. And there we are, left front axle removed.

Here we go, friends, a quick product comparison for you. We have our left front axle out of our 2007 Honda Accord. We just removed it, it was fairly easy. I just wanted to show you what it looks like compared to our brand new quality 1A Auto part here. I just want to make sure you understand that the length is important, right? We've got this part right here. The shaft that goes into the transmission is the same length, it matches up perfectly. If this was longer on the new one or the old one, well, you'd have the wrong part. As you can tell, it matches up. We can come along. We'll get to the other end. These match up as well. We've got the splined end, it came with a brand new nut. That's always wonderful. You want to make sure that this part right here is the same length as well. If this one was this long or this one's this long, you've got an issue. This looks the exact same. Okay? I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a perfect part to install in your vehicle.

Something to take note of, though, is that these axles do expand a little bit. They expand and contract. So if you're looking at your axle and one maybe seems like it's quite a bit longer, you know it's extended out further than the other one, well that's not really so much of an issue, because it just contracts. Okay? You can put them both in contract mode there, or extended mode, whatever you want to do, but the main thing that really matters is that the overall length is about the same, but this length right here and this is the same, and this one right here and this right here is the same. Okay?

Another great thing to notice is the new one doesn't have this dampener right here, which you might think that, "Oh no, it should have it," but really this is an issue. A lot of Honda's had an issue with water getting underneath here, rotting out, and axles breaking, and that might even be the reason why you're replacing this axle. We did away with it. You don't need it. I would say we're going to go ahead and install this quality part. And if you need this part or any other part, you can always check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks!

The next thing we're going to do now that we have the axle out, we're just going to take a look at our seal, which is this right here. Okay? It's nice, rubber, it should be super soft and pliable. If it seems like it's hardened, or cracked, dry rotted, split in any way, you'd want to replace that, which is fairly easy to do on these. This one right here is actually in great condition, so I'm not going to worry about replacing it. Something else to note would be if you pulled the axle and a lot of transmission fluid came out, you would want to make sure that you, of course, double check your transmission fluid and put it back up to par. Okay? Fluid comes out, fluid needs to go in. All right? It's always a good habit to check your transmission fluid anyways, but if fluid came out, you need to really check your transmission fluid. Okay?

We know the seals good. We can use a little bit of if you wanted to and you had maybe some Vaseline, or silicone, something like that, you could put a little bit along the seal just to keep it lubricated. Then we're going to take our new quality 1A Auto axles, and we're going to put it right in there, and we'll get it all mounted up. I've got a little bit of silicone right here. If you had Vaseline, that would probably work a little bit better, because it'll just melt down and dissipate a little bit. This is just going to help the axle slide in around that seal without hopefully damaging it in any way. We want that seal to stay nice and good up there, okay? We've got that in there.

We're going to have a rubber mallet ready. I'm going to put the axle back in the way that I took it out, right in through up here. Let's see if I can get it weaseled in, being careful for my seal. Like I said, that's super important. Here we go, I got it lined up. Now I'm going to get this down to working height. I've got my nut on there so I can't damage any threads. I'm going to use my rubber mallet, bonk, bonk. I'm going to bonk it in. Once it bottoms out in here, right back where we were looking at before, that should be pretty much right up against the transmission by the time we're done. Okay? Once it clips in, we're done with that and we'll move along to the next step.

I've got my rubber mallet, I've got my note on here. Not that I could probably damage any metal threads with my rubber mallet, but just in case. Now I'm just going to go ahead and drive this into the transmission. I'm going to wait until I feel it pop and snap in. Then I'm going to go under and I'm just going to take a peek, make sure the axle is right up against the transmission, it's not sitting this far away anymore, it should be pretty much right up against? okay. Okay. That felt like it went in pretty good. I'm just going to put this down. I can give this a little shake. It feels good.

Now what we're going to do, we're going to get this off. We're going to put the axle back through our wheel bearing right here. Okay? Then we'll start putting back together pretty much the opposite direction then we took it apart. All right, so now I'm going to use a little bit of copper never seize. I'm just going to try to spray it right on the splines right here. This is just going to help it come out sometime in the future in case we ever have to do, you know, an axle, or a wheel bearing, or anything that we have to take us back apart, this'll come out of the wheel bearing easier next time, okay? Just a little bit. It doesn't have to be anything too crazy and I don't really need to get it on the threads right here. It's okay if you do. It's not the end of the world, but we don't need to, basically.

Now I'm just going to try and get this down, see if I can move this enough. Come on. Okay. Let me get it back up and through here, being careful not to mess up my boot. Just try to squish it. Just squeeze it up through here. Like I said, I want to be careful not to mess up my boot. The last thing you want is moisture or anything getting in here. That's a brand new boot and I don't know if you want to watch my video on how to do the axle again, but I guess if that is the case then go ahead and do that. Anyway, I can get this through here. Get that lined up. I'm just going to wiggle it. If you wanted to, you could put a not on here. The only problem with putting the nut on there is if this was to drop back down, the axle is going to want to pull from someplace, so you take the risk of pulling your axle joint right here apart. If you want until we get the rest of it situated, you can just leave that not off and floating. Basically, you just want to have the axle sitting in there for now.

I'm going to see about winding up this little wishbone fork here. You might have to use something like a pry bar. Just give it a little twist. You know, there's lots of things that might be going on with your particular situation that might be different from mine. But for me, this fork right here is kind of twisted, so I need to deal with that. I'm just going to get this back up and sitting up here just so I don't have to keep holding onto the knuckle. Okay? Now I don't have to worry about it flopping down, hitting me in the face, or hurting me anyway. I can try to figure out this situation. What I need to do is I need to twist this, get it lined up with this hole, then I'm going to get that long bolt, I'm going to start bringing it through here, through there. I'm not going to really push it out all the way yet, because what I want to make sure I do is put this sway bar link nut back on while I still have access to it.

All right. I'm going to use a little bit more copper never seize. I'm just going to coat this bolt right here. This is where it goes through the bushing in the lower control arm. Generally speaking, it'll be going through like this, and right inside here, these things are almost always seize up, so we got very lucky that this came out. It kind of looks like it was getting to be on its way. I'm just going to spray it with some never seize, and this is going to make somebody's life a lot easier down the line. You're welcome. Okay.

Now, I'm going to grab my control arm, and I'm going to try to lift this up, and try to lift the control arm up so it meets up with this, line up those holes, and put the bolt through. Here we go. Wish me luck. This little piece right here is going to come off, so I'll just get it out of the way now. See if I can get them lined up.

Let's think if this isn't working right? Which it isn't. I'll show you something that you can try. I'm going to use my Phillips head screwdriver. I'm not going to be using it for what it's intended for, there's no screws right here that I'm going to be undoing, so it might get damaged. That's something to think about. You do you, booboo. But basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to line up these two holes with this, because it's pointy. Once I lift it up, I'm going to try to shove this through from the backside, right? I'm going to get everything so it's lining up and I'm going to keep that in there so I can move things around a little bit to get my bolt through. Okay? That's my plan. Stick with me, kid.

Let's see if we can get it. Okay. That's through there now and I'm going to make sure that this thing can't fall down, just like that. Now I'm going to try to see it through this hole right here and see what I need to do to line it up. What you might have to do might be a little bit different than what I have to do.

I'm just going to try to tap it in. That went through pretty good, so now I'm just going to bring it back out a little bit. There we are. I can do this link. I'll put it back through here, get my nut on, and then I can push this the rest of the way. Tighten this up. I'm going to torque it, of course. Then we'll move along to tightening up the rest, okay?

We've got our sway bar link. That's going to come through this hole right here. It's going to come through. I'm going to you use my nut for this application, it's a 15mm. Just going to see if I can line it up. The shaft does move around, so it doesn't line up perfectly with the hole, just move it around. It's just the ball and socket, okay? Easy peasy. Put that on there. Now I'm going to blast this on with my 15 swivel. Let's see if I can do it. All right.

I'm going to go ahead and tighten this up. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to show you, I'm going to try and get my Allen head in there, and I'm going to use a 15 ratchet or a ratchet wrench, I mean. I'm going to try to tighten it down that way just to show you what it'll be like, you know, trying to do it with this in here. Okay? All right, it'll hold the inside of that sway bar link. I'm using a 3/16ths Allen head right there. I going right in the center. I'm going to use my ratchet wrench. You can use whatever you've got. 15mm for this application. I'm going to hold the stud still with the Allen head and just tighten the nut down. Nice and tight. Let's get our stuff out of here. There we are. Now we'll just drive this the rest of the way through. We'll tighten that up or snug it up a little bit and then we'll torque it down.

I'm going to drive this through. There we are. I'm going to use my 17mm nut there. I'm just going to just going to tighten it down. Just pretty much bottom it out, okay? I'm going to use my 17 wrench on the backside there. Snug this up just so it bottoms out, and then we're going to torque it to 47 foot pounds. All right, here we go. I'm going to torque this down to 47 foot pounds. There we are. I'm just going to to do it one more time.

Okay. That's nice and torqued. We tightened this down. We didn't remove this. We've got a couple of bolts there, a couple of bolts over here, and then this right here. Let's keep rolling.

Okay. I'm going to get back off of here. It could have been harder. We've got our slotted ball joint nut. I'm just going to get this started on here. I'm going to turn a little bit to the left just to find the beginning thread and then I'm going to go right. I'm just going to bottom this out. I'm going to torque this down to 35 foot pounds. If it doesn't line up the slot with the hole that's in there. I'm just going to bring it to the next available hole, continuing tightening, I'm not going to loosen it to the next hole, I'm just going to tighten it. Okay? It's probably pretty close. Get it going here. Just get it down to 35. There we go. Okay. It looks like we're just past the hole, which is kind of a bummer, but it's okay. I'm just going to bring it, like I said, to the very next hole. Torque wrench is barking at me. That's okay. Here we are.

Now I'm going to put my cotter pin through. Brand new, put a little bit of goo on it. It should just go right through. If it gives you a struggle bonk it. I'm going to grab the ears. I'm just going to pull them around. You can put one on one side, one on the other, you can bring one down here, one over, whatever you want to do. All that matters is that it's peened over and this cotter pin cannot come out on its own. This locks in this nut and the nut holds this ball joint together. If this comes apart driving down the road, it's bad news for everybody. Okay? Here we go. We've got that done. Nice and torqued.

This is done. This is done. We're looking pretty great here. Let's get some small bolts in here. We'll get a nut on here. We'll torque it all up and then we can get the wheel on. I've got my bolts and my nuts. I'm just going to use a little bit of copper never seize. I love this stuff. It just makes my life easier down the line, or the next person's life, or next person job, whatever. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Get that up here. This one, let's see if I can get it through. Make sure I get that bracket. It has a little ear. The ear just sits in the hole. It's very important to make sure that you have all these things secured. Sometimes what you might notice is maybe this bolt broke, this one broke, or any of them broke, right?

Down here, you're pretty lucky if one broke, you've still got another one and holds it secured. You could probably get away with that. But if your brake line wasn't secured and it's just doing this, you need to figure out a way to get it to stay. You could use something like a wire tie. Just try to get it on there basically just so this can't move around, get caught in your wheel, get caught in your axle, I don't know. Just doing what it's not supposed to do, okay? Let's get these started in here. 10mm. Okay. Those are all definitely nice and tight lines are secured. Perfect. We'll get our nut on here. We'll find out what our torque's going to be. We'll move along.

All right, so I'm going to use my 32. I'm just going to snug this axle nut down. We're not going to go too tight, because I want to torque it to 135 foot pounds. I'm going to continue with my 32mm socket. There it is. I'm just going to hit one more time. Cool.

Now, you'll notice the top of the axle right here has a little notch out. All right? That's so we can peen this axle nut down. You want to use something like a punch, or whatever you happen to have, and peen this down so it'll lock it in. That's just going to prevent it from backing off somehow down the line. Just kind of peen it down. There we are. Some people might be tempted to use an air gun on that, and blast it on nice and tight, and maybe even hammer on it. What's going to happen at that point is you're going to damage your wheel bearing back there. If you did happen to use the air gun for some reason and you just bottomed it out, just go very gentle, bottom it out, and then make sure you torque it to 135 foot pounds.

Now, I'm going to get the wheel back up on here, just like that. I've got my 19mm lug nuts with my socket. Just get them on. All right, so now I'm just going to bottom these out in a star pattern. Okay,?I'm not going to go very tight because it's only 80 foot founds.

Now, I want to get the wheels so it's just barely touching the ground and can't spin like that and then I'm going to talk them down in a star pattern. I'm just going to tighten these down with my 19mm socket. I'm going to go into star pattern, so I'm going to start here. I'm going to make a nice pretty star. If I felt like it, I can go around one more time. It's really your prerogative what you want to do. I like to go around twice. Some people will say, "Don't worry about it." I'll just go around. Nice and snug. There we go. Great job.

Thanks for watching. If you want the parts to do it yourself, check out 1AAuto.com, the place for DIY auto repair.