Below is a video on how to replace front sway bar links on a 2005-09 Subaru Outback
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Today we are going to be showing you how to replace the front sway bar links on this 2007 Subaru Outback. This will be the exact same for 2005-2009 Subaru Outbacks. This is a fairly easy job that you can do in your driveway on the ground. We have access to the lift today so we’re going to go ahead and use that just to make it a little easier to film.
So if you were doing this in the driveway you want to park the car on a level surface and chock the rear wheels, grab a 19mm and a breaker bar and go ahead and crack the front passenger and driver side lug nuts loose. Then grab a floor jack and jack it up, place some jack stands under both sides to safely support the car. We want to elevate the front of the vehicle so we can remove both front wheels as it will just make it a little bit easier to get in there and get to the front sway bar links. With the car on the lift and in the air we’ll grab our impact and our 19mm and remove the lug nuts from the drivers side wheel. With the lug nuts removed we can now go ahead and remove the wheel and set it aside. Once we have the drivers side wheel and tire removed we can go ahead and do the same thing on the passenger side.
All right, so we’re going to start on the driver’s side sway bar link. You can see our lower control arm and the ball joint right here. Right next to that is the driver’s side sway bar link. This one is not making any noise yet, but if we look at it closely, we can see that the boot is deteriorated and ripped allowing dirt and debris to get in there and it’s going to cause it to fail in a short time. So, we’re going to go ahead and grab some penetrating oil, and we will spray this nut and bolt section right here and up here and on the passenger side. I like using the deep creep by seafoam penetrating oil. We’ll spray both of the front sway bar links and let it soak in for a little bit then come back.
We will grab a 17mm socket and a ratchet or impact and we’re going to go ahead and loosen the nut on the bottom of the sway bar link and the top of the sway bar link. More than likely when you start loosening the nut the stud part of it will spin within the socket. So some of the aftermarket ones you will be able to use a wrench to keep it from turning. This is an OEM Subaru one so it just has a shoulder on it so we will need a pair of adjustable pliers or channel lock pliers to hold it and to keep it from turning or you can use an allen wrench and place it in the end of the stud to hold it from turning as well.
Once we have the socket and pliers in position then we’ll go ahead and remove the nut. Now that the bottom nut is removed, we will go ahead and do the same to remove the top nut. We can go ahead and just wiggle it out, take the top out, rotate it down and then get the bottom out of the A arm. Here’s our old link. We’ll go ahead and unpackage the new one and get ready to reinstall that one. You will want to make sure it matches up exactly the same between the new and old link. This aftermarket link has a hex nut here rather than just that shoulder so we will be able to get a proper size wrench in there and hold that as we tighten this nut down. It should come with brand new threaded lock nuts as they are nylon locking nuts so you want to make sure you have new nuts that came with it as well.
To reinstall the new link we’ll go ahead and just pop off the nuts quickly. Go ahead and install it the way that we took out the old one, put it in the bottom part of the A arm part first, rotate it up and align it then get it to our sway bar. Go ahead and start the nuts by hand. Now that we have the nuts started by hand. We’ll run them down till they’re just a little bit closer to the sway bar and to the bracket of the A arm just to limit a little bit of movement. But we will still want some as we still need to loosen and remove the other sway bar link and replace it.
All right, so grab our 17 mm socket and our impact. For this aftermarket link it’s going to be a 14 mm wrench to hold this nut inside the sway bar link, so it doesn’t rotate. We may or may not need it as we are using an air impact gun. We’ll snug it up a little bit until we get the other side replaced then we’ll do our final torque and tightening. With the drivers side link installed and the nuts snugged down a bit we can go ahead and repeat the process to replace the passenger side link.
Once we have the passenger side sway bar link replaced we are going to grab a 17mm socket and our torque wrench and torque all the front sway bar links nuts to 34lb of torque. It’s a good idea to check the rubbers on the sway bar to make sure they are in good condition and also don’t need to be replaced. If they are in good condition you can put rubber conditioning spray on them to make sure you don’t have any squeaks.
Once we have all four of the sway bar links torqued down we can now reinstall the wheels on both the drivers and passenger side. We’re going to go ahead and put the wheel back on, start our lug nuts by hand, then snug them down with the impact making sure to just to seat the lug nuts. Then we’ll lower the car back down to the ground and torque them. Make sure you tighten/ torque them in a star pattern to make sure you get the wheel to pull onto the hub evenly so that way you do not cause any vibrations. We’ll go ahead and get our torque wrench and torque the lug nuts to 90lbs of torque.
So that’s it. We just showed you how to replace front sway bar links on a 2005-2009 Subaru Outback
