How to Free a Ball Joint on a Car

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Nate 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 drive vehicle's ball joint. In this video I'm going to talk about one the special tools required for removal of a ball joint or other front end components. This is called a pickle fork and as you can see it has a tapered design. What that does is break the mechanical weld between the spindle and the ball joint. They have tapered, reverse tapered, or concave convex fed and when they squeeze together they get real stuck; this is the tool you use to unstick them. Its pretty much inserted between the ball joint and stud and the spindle and hammered into place. As you can see that has broken the ball joint connection and I can remove that ball joint with a pry bar now. See how it's moving for me? As you can see, once we have the ball joint broken loose, you can pry it down out of the spindle. Never pry on your constant velocity joint and never pry on your gust shield from your brakes; you'll damage them pretty easily."