How to Reload a Truck Suspension

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Nate McCullough on behalf of Expert Village. In the following clips, we're going to talk about the correct procedure for replacing your upper and lower ball joints on a two wheel drive, full sized vehicle. In this clip we're going to talk about reloading the vehicle's front suspension. I'm going to point at something here for you. It is the very large heavy duty spring that holds the vehicle up in the air. This is your coil spring, right here, the big coils. There's one, two, three of them. Right now that coil spring is pushing down as hard as it can. If I were to separate my upper ball joint without reloading it, your front wheel, or where your wheel bolts to, is going to spring down extremely hard, possibly damaging you or some of your tools. What I'm going to do is take my floor jack and place it on the lower ball joint and jack it up to take up the pressure that the spring has, which is an amazing amount of force. I'm going to go ahead and get my jack snugged up on there. I'm going to jack it up until that ball joint is just about parallel to the ground. As you can see it's raising up here. It's pivoting on the control arm bushings. And right there is good. Like I said, that is the first thing your going to want to do before you begin breaking lose any of these front end components is to release the pressure of that spring. Your using your floor jack to overcome it and to hold it in place for you. That's the proper method your going to use for loading your vehicle's front suspension."