Length: 8:54
Created: August 24, 2020
[0:00] What’s up, guys? Today we’re going to be talking about our SuperATV Radius Arms, what to look for when they’re worn out, and how to service them.
This machine has quite a few miles on it. We’ve been riding it forever with these radius arms, as you can tell—they’ve got some movement. That’s fine, but what’s happening inside is there’s a monoball that’s getting worn out.
Ours might not be as worn out as yours are, but what you can do is grab your tire and move it from side to side with your machine up. Take them apart and look. A lot of times, it’ll start to wear inside of there.
Also take a look at the heim joints. These are both standard wear products and obviously a heim joint will wear out over time. Like I said, this thing has a ton of miles. We’ll also look at our inner bushings and monoballs.
[0:53] The first thing we’re going to do is remove our wheel and tire. We’re just going to show you on one radius arm today. If you can do one, you can do all of them.
We’ll take an 18 mm socket and an 18 mm wrench and loosen the bolt to remove it. One thing I see a lot of people do, just from being around this kind of stuff, is take their impact and run the bolt out instead of taking the pressure off of it.
That’s never a good idea. You’re going to wear out the knuckle here and potentially damage the threads or tear the bushing up—it’s just a horrible idea to do that.
When you remove any hardware, if there’s a bunch of tension on it, you want to pick it up and look—this bolt’s free. When it’s not, it’s hard to get out. We’ll just pick up a little bit—you don’t have to do too much—and the bolt comes right out, nice and easy. There was no struggle. We don’t have to use the impact and we’re not tearing anything up.
[1:51] Next we’ll remove the bolt securing the radius arm to the frame. We’ll take an 18 mm wrench and slide it through here. Sometimes these can be a little bit tricky to get on, but I just use the open end of the wrench and get it on the nut. Hold on to it and take the socket and ratchet impact, or whatever tools you’re using today, and remove the nut.
Another tip is, I don’t like to remove the nut all the way with the impact because it drops underneath the transmission. If you’ve done that before, you know that’s a pain to get out. I like to take my hand and reach in to unthread it the rest of the way. That way, I know it’s my hand and I’m not going to lose it. It makes it so much easier.
Go ahead and remove the bolt completely. Put the nut back on the bolt—that’s another good tip so you don’t lose your hardware.
Now we’ll pull a little bit of slack out of our brake line. We can flip our radius arm right underneath it a lot of times. We’ve got it pinched in between here, so we’ll probably have to loosen one of our other radius arms. But if you were going to change them, you would obviously be changing all four of them at once. So at this point you would want to remove all four of your bolts.
[3:17] So we have our radius arms removed. As you can see, there’s a lot of side-to-side movement. This isn’t bushing movement—this is monoball movement. So this will cause a lot of noise, a lot of clanking. They’re supposed to have a little bit of play when you get them from us, if you order them brand new.
As you can see if you look down in here, it kind of wears a groove over time. It gets a lot of dirt and debris in there so what that does is cause the clanking. And obviously, over time, it can damage itself to the point where it’ll mess with your camber and things of that nature. That’s just another thing you want to keep an eye on.
[3:50] Here are the bushings. They’ve got quite a bit of wear, just from that monoball starting to wear out a little bit. We’ll se these aside real quick and talk about heim joints.
When I check a heim, I’m looking for any kind of play, whether it’s side to side or up and down. This time, it’s fairly tight, but if you listen to it, you can tell it’s definitely starting to get worn out. That’s going to make quite a bit of noise.
Instead of just changing the bushings on the heim—if you’ve got 2,000 miles on this set of radius arms—I’d go ahead an change the monoball. We’re going to show you how to change your bushings and then pull a whole new heim joint on it.
[4:36] We’re going to reach down through here. It’s probably hard for you to see because of all the dust and dirt in here, but there is a snap ring. We’re going to take our snap ring pliers, press the snap ring, and then remove it.
As you can see here, this is the side that we need to press from. So if you were going to change your heim, you’ll take a measurement from the center of this hole to the center of this hole. That way, you have a measurement. If your camber was set correctly, then you know this is going to be correct.
Then just take this jam nut loose, thread your heim joint out, thread your new one in, and set your adjustment to your previously marked down measurement.
[5:28] Let’s head on over to the press. We found something that we can press through here—just one of our press tools that we use for ball joints. Then we found the socket. This specific socket, it’s a 15, it’s just an old socket we have. We’re going to press this bushing straight through.
This is the inside of your radius arm. As you can see, we’ve got it pressed out. Obviously, any time you’re changing a bearing, bushing, monoball, or anything, you want to get this A-arm as clean as you possibly can. We’re going to get some Brakleen and get in here. Look at that—that’s what’s wearing that monoball out.
It’s pretty hard to get in here and clean it up. The best thing to do is make sure you’re spraying it off and trying to clean it with some Brakleen. Maybe even every once in awhile, take your radius arms off, take your bushings out, and use an air blower to get the dust out. Put some lubricant in there to make sure it’s lubricated all the time.
Like I said, we’re going to get in here and get this nastiness cleaned out.
[6:53] Whether it’s monoballs, bushings, or heim joints, you can pick up everything you need to rebuild your radius arms at SuperATV.com.
We’ve got ourselves a new monoball here. Obviously, there are two sides to this radius arm. There’s a side with the lip and then there’s a side with the groove and snap ring. The side with the groove and snap ring is the side we’re going to press our monoball into.
When you’re pressing your monoball out, it doesn’t really matter if you damage it. But when you re-install it, you want to find something that sits on the outer edge of the monoball perfectly. We have a 22 mm socket and we’ll use that to press this in.
[7:46] As you can see, we’ve pressed our monoball in all the way and our snap ring groove is visible. We’ll grab our snap ring and place it down in the groove.
Now everything’s good and clean. It’s never a bad idea to take a little bit of grease and put it in here, roll the monoball around, and just put a real thin coat of grease as you continue rolling it. Then flip it around and do the opposite side—just get it really good and clean and put a little bit of grease in there.
Obviously, with the heim, you don’t need to grease it just yet. You just want to reinstall it.
Repeat all of these steps for the rest of your radius arms and then you’re ready to install them on your machine. If your heim joints begin to get squeaky after riding, be sure to clean and then lubricate them.
[8:38] Once your radius arms are serviced, you’re ready to get back on the trail! For more information or any questions you have on servicing your radius arms, be sure to get a hold of us. Thanks for watching and we’ll catch you next time!
