1998 Ford Crown Victoria Front 12 Piece Steering & Suspension Kit TRQ PSA58976

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the outer steering tie rod end on this 2000 Lincoln Town Car. It's actually the same as any '81 to 2002 Town Car. Tools you'll need are 13/16 inch and 19 millimeter sockets with a ratchet, a torque wrench, pliers, tie-rod separator fork, hammer, ruler, and a marker or a grease pencil.

We're going to start out. Remove your center cap. If you're using hand tools you'll want to loosen your lug nuts while the wheel's on the ground first, then raise the car with the jack stand, and then remove your lug nuts. I have the benefit of air tools. These are 13/16 inch lug nuts. We'll just speed it up here as we remove those lug nuts and then remove the wheel entire.

Pull or turn your steering wheel so you can have easy access to the tie rod. Apologies here, I didn't get a very good shot of it, but all I'm doing is using a pair of needle nose pliers to break off the ends of the cotter pin, and then pull it out of the tie rod stud. This bolt's 19 millimeters. We'll speed it up here a little bit as we just remove that bolt the rest of the way. Now, right here, on the steering linkage there's a bolt with a nut on the back side that holds a clamp. It's a half inch, which I'm surprised about. It can seem to bounce back and forth between metric and standard, but we want to loosen up this bolt.

Now, we're going to hit the end of the tie rod end with a lot of penetrating oil. Now we want to separate the tie rod end from the steering knuckle. There are two ways you can go about this. The best way is using the correct tool which is a tie rod and ball joint separator, sometimes called a pickle fork. The other way is you could take your bolt, thread it back on, actually, upside down onto your tie rod end, and then use a hammer to try to force it out. That bolt keeps the tie rod stud from mushrooming and then not being able to go through here, so you'd want to make sure you get the bolt down level with the stud, and then beat on it. This is not always successful. It can cause stress to your steering knuckle, so it's not a hundred percent recommended. Also, if you do it this way, you probably will have problems getting this bolt back off because it will get stuck onto the stud. The right way is with a pickle fork. I do make a minor mistake here. You see I took that nut off. You actually want to loosen that nut and leave it on. You'll see later so that when you do break the tie rod loose the pickle fork doesn't fall and the tie rod or the steering linkage doesn't fall. It's not a big deal, but just a little safer way to do it is to leave that bolt threaded on there so it doesn't come apart too violently. You can see there's an ear on this side which means they want you to go at it just like this. This is one of those times when it's fun not to be nice. I don't have a lot of room here.

So, now what I'm going to do is use a red permanent marker, you can use anything. I mean grease pencil or something would be best. I'm going to really put a bunch of red ink there. That's going to tell me how far in the tie rod was. Now, I'm going to take a large adjustable wrench, and, on these tie rods, clockwise actually is moving them out, so you want to basically just start turning, and this one actually started turning pretty easy.

We'll measure from the end here. I would say it's about eight and three quarters centimeters. For this one, down here, do the same and mark. This'll just give you a rough alignment. After this repair, you should have your car aligned.

Remember on this side it's counterclockwise you can install it. Then up to my mark and one more. Remove the nut. That plastic is a shipping boot, so we want to remove that. If you have paper towels, clean off. Clean out the steering knuckle. I'm just going to push the new tie rod. It's going to be stiff. Push it a little bit. Work it up in there. Get the nut on. Now, we need to torque our nut on here. I've got the torque wrench set to 50 foot-pounds. Then at a brief look, it looks like you pull it just a little tighter to get the cotter pin into it. I'll need a cotter pin. Put it in from the side here. It just needs a little convincing. It's got to get up and over. It doesn't go anywhere. Briefly tighten this bolt here. When I get this tight, it probably should be about 20 to 25 foot pounds. I'm just going to get it pretty tight with my ratchet here.

Now we're going to fast forward through putting the tire back on, thread the lug nuts on by hand. I use my impact wrench just to tighten them preliminarily, and then lower it down to the ground. Torque them to 100 foot-pounds using a star pattern, and then put my center cap back on.

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