How to Remove an Upper Ball Joint on Trucks

Part of the Video Series How to Replace a Truck Ball Joint

Viewing videos requires the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player.
Get the latest Flash player.

Learn how to use a pickle fork on the upper ball joint in this free auto repair and car maintenance video clip.

Rating:
Views: 937
Comments: 0 (comment now)

Favorited: 0 | Add to Favorites

Tags: auto repair, car maintenance
Bookmark at:

All Videos in the Series, How to Replace a Truck Ball Joint

Member Comments

Video Transcript

How to Remove an Upper Ball Joint on Trucks
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 the proper method for breaking the mechanical weld between your ball joint and your spindle. The way this is designed, and I'll show you on my new ball joint here in a second, is it is a concave here on this side and a convex on this side. They are a taper reverse taper; when they squeeze together they are actually designed to hold tight even if the nut breaks off. How you break that fitting is with the tool here, it's called a pickle fork. Your going to take and slip it between your spindle and your ball joint and hammer it into position. The hammering action is going to apply leverage just through this taper that will break that fitting. I'm going to set my tool down and grab my new ball joint and show you the taper on it. As you can see it's skinner at the top and gets fatter and fatter at the bottom. As that nut tightens down it squeezes that progressively fatter portion into a progressively smaller hole which generates what they call a mechanical weld. I'm going to take my pickle fork and slip it between the two of them and hammer it into position. You're going to hammer away until the weld gives free. It may take a considerable amount of hammering. Right there the mechanical weld has been broken, as you can see our upper ball joint is now free and we're ready to continue with the rest of the disassembling procedure. That is the proper way to seat your pickle fork and break the mechanical weld between the spindle and the ball joint.

About the Expert

Expert: Nathan McCullough graduated from Nashville Auto-Diesel College and worked at varies automotive facilities including management for the last 8 years. He has many certifications. Read More