Newbie after steering help please.

[macmils]

Hi all,

I've followed the forums for a while now since buying my truck last year (K Reg 2.4 2nd Gen) and having sucessfully fixed my turbo after finding advice from searching the forums I thought I would have a go at fixing my steering wobble which has been getting steadily worse.

After taking it to a tyre garage and asking them to change rear and front wheels round and perform a wheel balance and full alignment they got as far as jacking the front wheels up and stopping. They pointed out that there was too much play in the steering and I should get sort out that out first.

Now I'm not a mechanic by any means, but I thought it was time to get my hands mucky and try sorting this myself. I decided to replace the track rods, upper and lower ball joints, steering idler and pitman arm, ordered the parts from Roughtrax and they arrived promtply during the week.

Today I started the replacement process and have got as far as removeing both trackrods (trackrods are still intact - my hands not so much) and I'm now stuck at how to remove the upper/lower ball joints. How is this done? On the upper, I've removed the four nuts on the top but how do I separate this? I've looked at the lower joint and I'm not sure about that either.

Any adivce on how to do this would be appreciated, also how do I move the aircon radiator to get at the nuts holding the steering idler bolts in place?

[KERRSURF]

I don't know how much mechanical skill you have but I do think you should be asking for practical help (if anyone on hear with the knowledge to do these jobs is near to you and willing to help)
The jobs you have detailed are not very difficult but if not done properly could have fatal consequences for yourself/passengers or other road users.

If this is the first time you have ever tackled a job like this I strongly urge you to get qualified help and learn with them as they guide you through the work or get it down to the garage and have the mechanics do it.

I would like to give you further advice on actually doing the job but I don't think that would be wise, I don't believe anything but proper practical help would suffice.

[TonyN]

You need a decent ball joint spitter.

The wishbones are under pressure from the torsion bars pushing them on to the bumpstops, I generally jack under the lower ball joint and get as much space between the upper wishbone and the bumpstop as you can. Then wedge something in the gap so when you release the ball joint tapered end, the hub will drop down and you'll get the ball joint itself out.

Similar for the bottom, cept' you'll just be swinging the lower wishbone down once its undone.

You can do the idler without messing with the A/C rad. With the bash plate out the way, there is room to get a spanner up there, or do it from over the top of the idler and reach down.

[wishbone]

And don't forget to buy a torque wrench to do the bolts up to spec...

[macmils]

Thanks for the advice, I will be getting a mechanic to come round and check what I've done as I appreciate the safty concerns.

Since my first post, I have now replaced the upper and lower balljoint on the drivers side and the upper balljoint on the passenger side. I ran out of time to get on with lower one - work commitments and all that so this will continue at the weekend.

I've got the front of the truck up on axle stands, so as I tackled each side I jacked up under the lower wishbone to put the whole side up, braced the upper wishbone from the ground with a large block of wood then used the ball joint splitter to separate them. That worked but I had to put a lot of pressure on the lower wishbone afterwards to get the loose joint out and replace it with the new. I also broke two fork type splitters on the lower balljoint (halfords cheap type). The scissor type splitter worked on it though.

So I now need to change the passenger lower balljoint, pack all joints with grease, change the steering idler and the pitman arm, put in the new track rods and then torq everything up. I think thats the next weeked well and truely sorted.

If all this works and once I've paid my subs, I could post some pics of how it was done as I've been taking pictures during this in case they could be of use.