How to Torque Castle Nuts in Trucks

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 size vehicle. In this clip, we're going to talk about tightening down of our fastener bolts for our upper and lower ball joints and installation of our cotter pins. I'm going to set my cotter pins aside for a moment. We have two different size sockets that work; yours may be identical depending on the specific make and model. Take and insert the socket into my half inch drive ratchet, and go ahead and tighten it down. It's going to be better on a front end component to get the cotter pinhole to line up if you go tighter than looser. It looks pretty tight there. Let me go ahead and try to slip my cotter pin in and see if I've got my holes lined up, and I do. So you can see here, I have the hole and the ball joint stud lined up with the notch in the castle nut, so I'm going to take and slide my cotter pin through there. Since you guys can get a good view of this one, I'm going to show you how to finish off your cotter pin job. What we're going to do is bend down both of the tabs and fold them underneath the ball joint stub; just like so. That's a safety device. It's like the pin on a grenade. You have to intentionally remove it before it will come loose. Let me go ahead and tighten up my upper ball joint, it's exactly the same procedure as the lower one. You may have to do a little tweaking to get your cotter pin to seat. Alright, now my cotter pin's seated, so what I'm going to do is use a screwdriver just because I don't have a good leverage point to bend my tabs on. I'm going to stick my screwdriver in there and pry down on it to bend the tabs. And that is the proper way to tighten down your vehicle's ball joints and install your cotter pins."