How to Remove a Ball Joint Retaining Nut

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Nat McCullough on behalf of Expert Village. In these clips, we're going to talk about the proper way to remove and replace a front wheel drives vehicles ball joint. In this clip, we're going to talk about removal of the ball joints retaining nut. There are two styles that you may possibly run across. This one has what you'd call a through bolt. As you can see on the ball joints stud, there's a grove. The retaining bolt runs through that grove, something?s similar like this and clamps down and keeps the ball joint from coming off. The other style you may run across is that the ball joint will be threaded on top and then actually a large nut will go down on top of it and hold it in place. Due to room constraints on front wheel drive vehicles, almost nine times out of ten, it will have a through bolt. That eliminates the need for the stud to be bigger and having a large nut on it. Generally on pickup trucks, light trucks, and things of that nature, you will see the threads on the top. So pay attention to that. The nut and bolt is located right down here. As you can see. What I'm going to do is put an opened end wrench on the nut for bolt. And use my three inch ratchet with the socket on the other side. You can see how I set my wrench on there using the spindle to actually hold it for me, so I can use both hands on the ball joints containing bolt. And there you go. It may be necessary, just depending on how corroded it is, to actually have to screw the bolt out of its location. You can see, as I'm turning it the bolt is beginning to come out."