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Depends on your car. On some cars (like mine) you are forced to replace the ball joints and control arms as they are attached together. Really you should replace the control arms along with the ball joints but you would probably be able to get away with it. That’s if your car doesn’t have them both attached. I found this video of Eric which should help you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd5IcN3yjsg
A quick easy way to find out if you can change just the ball joints is to try an auto parts store online catalog, and see if they list just the ball joint, or if they only sell the entire arm. If they only list the arm, then it is a pretty fair bet that you need to replace the whole thing.
It depends. If you live south of Mason City, Iowa, you may be able to remove all the bolts using Barbie’s My First Socket Set.
You can see several videos on YouTube of guys (why is it always guys?) with middlin to deep southern accents showing you how easy it is to do these things. How nice for them.
But if you live in the Land Of Ice and Snow the bolts may be very firmly rusted into the nuts and through-bushings. Sometimes you can heat up the captive nuts and get the bolt out of the nut, but much more often the bolt will not break free of the bushing and the bushing will just spin free of its rubber mounting and you’ll have to order the whole control arm. So keep a Harbor Freight $19.95 4 inch electric cutoff saw handy. You may need it. See this pic:? Three things about it: (1) The center hole, used to be a rubber bushing in there (2) See the little shiny spot? That’s where the ABS hlddown screw was before it snapped off, under the mildest of encouragement to unscrew. See the big shiny thing at the right? that’s the bolt that went through the wheel hub, it had to be cut out and pried from its mounts. And this was after using Liquid Wrench, PB blaster, heat, impact air gun, and cursing.
I’ve done like six sets of these and every time had to get new rear control arms. The front ones don’t get quite that bollixed up. Your results may vary and be better than as described here but be forewarned.
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