Length: 5:07
Created: September 3, 2020
[0:00] What’s up guys? Today we’re going to talk a little bit about our heavy-duty ball joints. We’ll show you how to check to see when they’re starting to wear, and how to adjust them to get them tightened back up.
We’ll grab hold of this tire. When we do that, you guys can probably hear that noise. That’s what we’d hear while going down the trail, every time we hit a bump, a rock, or an obstacle.
Let’s remove our tires so we can gain access to our ball joint.
[0:47] Now we have our wheel and tire removed. As you can see, this is our upper ball joint and this is the one that was very loose. Right there is a little pin. That pin is keeping the ball joint from spinning.
Right around this edge is a retaining clip. We have to remove this clip. I like to take a pick and a screwdriver. Slide it in here just like this and separate the clip apart.
Once you’ve removed the clip, set it aside.
[1:26] Then there’s this pin we were talking about. You want to get a pick or something where you can push it out. We’ve got ours pushed out.
Instead of just tightening this ball joint down, we’re going to remove the top cap here. One reason is, we’re going to clean it out.
Another reason, we’re going to lubricate it. We’ll just put some grease down in there—that’s perfectly acceptable to do that.
[1:51] We’ll remove this. As you can see, these were definitely starting to get worn out. It’s definitely time to get them cleaned up, so we’re going to do that. We’ll get a rag and wipe out all this old grease. Wipe out this socket here. Get in there and get it good adn clean.
All the grease lines here, where the grease is flowing to the actual ball on the ball joint—make sure you get those good and clean as well.
[2:32] Now we’ll come over to the actual ball joint and wipe it out as well. Obviously you won’t get every last bit of grease out. We’re just trying to get the majority it—whatever we can get with our rag here—so we can put new good grease in there.
Then we’ll take our grease gun. Just put two or three pumps right down in there, just like that. Now we’ve got some fresh grease.
Let’s take a cap. I’ll start threading that right back down in there. Once we get to the point where it starts to get tight, we’ll try to tighten it just a little bit more.
It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to get it much tighter than that, so we’ll have to rotate it back one turn, to this point right here, so we can get our pin back in.
[3:51] Once we’ve adjusted our ball joint to where it makes contact and it’s tight, we’ll reinstall our retaining pin. Just use a flat-head screwdriver. It’s easy enough.
We’ll take the retaining clip and install it. Make sure it’s in the groove and the opening isnt’ lined up with the pin.
Now, if you have any other ball joints that are loose or anything like that, just go through and repeat the same process.
[4:27] We have our tire bolted back on. As you can see, I’m picking up on it even harder than I was last time and there is no movement in this upper ball joint. There’s no clicking anymore, no clanking.
And that’s literally how simple it is! That’s a 10 minute job to clean your ball joint out and get it greased up. Then it’s ready to go again, just like brand new.
We have the 4340, the threaded, and then our 300M ball joint—all adjustable. You can do that to each of those ball joints. You wear them out, you adjust them, and then you’re ready to get back on the trail!
