front_suspension_full_disassembly_and_rebuild_smart_fortwo_451_2008_2015¶

4 excerpts.

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youtube.com/pb_garage/front_suspension_full_disassembly_and_rebuild_smart_fortwo_451_2008_2015 · p. 1 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

hey guys welcome to pb garage today we're having a look at a smart car again this time we've got a car that has a clunk in the front end so going over bumps a bit of clunk in the front suspension there we're gonna have a look at a couple of different things in the front end that can go wrong with these i've already taken quite a bit of the car apart here as you can see and that's just to be able to look at all the different parts of the suspension you guys might not have to do all this work to replace some of the stuff but depending on what you're working on and what tools you have you may have to go to this extent so let's get into it i'm going to strap you guys on and have a look okay so when you guys want to sort of track down a clunk in the front end over bumps what you're gonna do first with the wheel still on um like i've already got it off obviously but with the wheels still on you wanna grab that wheel give it a little bit of a wiggle left to right and a little bit of a wiggle top to bottom if you've got a bit of play when you wiggle it top to bottom chances are the thing that's going to have failed is the bushings in the control arm now that's a fairly straightforward job to replace them what happens a lot of the time that rubber just separates from it's in a little metal sleeve that's pressed into the control arm and the rubber separates from that sleeve and you get a bit of slop there that's a fairly straightforward thing to fix basically unbolt that control arm at the bottom and undo the ball joint that's here behind the rotor and then you can remove that whole control arm and either press new bushings into it or you can buy a complete control arm that has new bushings in it and then just reassemble it and you're good to go another place that you can see a failure is actually on this ball joint here um sometimes they develop a bit of slop in the in the ball end of it there again fairly easy to replace uh you'll need to remove the control arm probably in order to press that ball joint out or again maybe easier just to buy a complete control arm that has all new stuff in it and just replace that part now in my case when i did this and i checked it i didn't have any play top to bottom and i actually didn't have um any play left to right either if there was a little bit of play left to right the things i would check would be this tie rod end here common place for these to fail is um you know they just get a bit of slop in here and then you get a bit of a wobble and it can give you kind of weird steering as well so i am going to replace this just to put new parts on it since i'm in here but uh in this case this thing was actually in pretty good shape and another thing that you want to check is this spring often what happens is that top ring of the spring breaks off and then the spring kind of shoots up and hits the body up here and it's not really so you lose a piece of the spring and then it's not really sitting in the right spot so it doesn't have the same amount of tension on it or the same amount of compression keeping that spring kind of tight and what happens is over bumps it'll actually be loose when that wheel extends fully and you get a clunk because this spring is coming up and hitting the bodywork every time in my case that spring's still okay so i was still looking for other issues and what i came up with was basically by looking at this um little flange i guess or a little retaining cup here at the top um you can see here how it's tight to the bodywork and right now i don't have i've got the wheel fully extended so i have my bottle jack here but i don't have any pressure pushing it up yet and what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna just start to raise that and there you can see the gap opening up between here uh between that little cup or that little underside of the rubber there and the bodywork and this little gap here tells me that the rubber bushing on the top of that strut is worn out and it's giving me that little bit of play so every time i go over a bump you know like in normal driving the cup will be sitting like this uh with the weight of the car on it and they'll have that gap but then when i go over a bump that's big enough that the wheel drops out it'll come down and it'll hit the bodywork so this little cup will come down and hit that bodywork and that's where that clump clunk in the front end is coming from so a little bit of work to undo this i'm gonna show you guys how to remove this uh whole assembly because you can it is possible to slip this strut out of um your knuckle here but it is a little bit of a challenge so instead of doing that what i'm gonna do is i'm actually gonna undo the lower ball joint and remove this whole assembly and that's the same thing that i would do if i was trying to replace this spring so yeah let's get into it so i'm gonna take the weight off the suspension again so i'm just gonna release my bottle jack and let that come down fully so that i have some extra room to work and what i'm going to do first you can see i've already put some penetrating lube on the bolt that's holding the sway bar link to the strut because i want to remove that strut to be able to

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youtube.com/pb_garage/front_suspension_full_disassembly_and_rebuild_smart_fortwo_451_2008_2015 · p. 2 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

get at the mount that rubber mount that's on the top of the strut i need to undo this bolt and get that out of the way so the strut's free to come out next i've got a 17 mil socket on my tie rod end here just to get that bolt out and i got lucky here my tie rod ends already loose this thing's a bit worn it's going to be replaced with a new one anyway next i'm using an 18 mil socket to remove the bolts that are holding the caliper and caliper bracket next i'm going to remove this wheel speed sensor and that's an e10 external torx [Music] next up i'm going to remove this nut off the ball joint and then i'll probably have to use an air chisel just to push that down through [Music] so now all i have left to do is to remove this nut at the top of the strut that's holding it in that's a 21 mil socket on that as well and the last thing that i have to do is just because the the strut isn't supported underneath i'm going to hold it around the fender here i'm just going to hold on to that strut so it doesn't fall away from the car and there's that nut undone i'm gonna remove those and here comes my whole strut assembly with my wheel bearing my knuckle everything together and this is this rubber isolator here that's on the top and that's the part that's worn out so i've got my spring compressor set up here to be able to compress that spring a little bit and take apart the top of the strut here i just want to point out that this is not the ideal way to have this set up this strut compressor is obviously made for struts that are quite a bit bigger and springs are quite a bit bigger than the the smart car stuff better way to do it would probably be to have some smaller uh separate spring compressors and just pull that spring down a little bit but i'm gonna go ahead and pull that spring down just a little bit to take the load off of the top of the strut here and then i'm gonna pull this 21 mil nut off with my impact driver again so i've taken my nut off i can take my isolator off and i have my little bearing here okay this is the little cup at the top so that's gonna stay this little bearing here tends to go bad quite often and they're pretty cheap so it's good to replace them at the same time as we're replacing this isolator now this one doesn't look too bad but obviously there was a bit of play there so it's worn out just enough that it needs replacement so here's the new replacement part i'm using you can see the part number off of it there brand new phoebe part in mint condition doesn't look much different than the original one but should make the difference i've got my new bearing as well that i'm gonna install so i just drop my bearing into the little cup part throw that on top throw my nut on and then i'm gonna make sure that the spring lines up with that little cup so that when i zip that on with my impact it's going to be lined up properly i can release my spring compressor now [Music] now something you want to have a look at just before you reinstall it is to make sure that your spring's sitting on this cup properly in my case it was actually off a little bit because everything wasn't lined up perfectly straight when i reassembled it with the impact gun on the on the spring compressor there so all it took was a little bit of a pull on the spring a little bit of a wiggle just to get make sure that cup was sitting down in the spring properly and now that everything's put back together i can go ahead and reassemble everything into the car so i just noticed as i was going to reassemble that the boot on this ball joint here in the control arm is actually torn the ball joint still feels good but i can tell that dirt's been getting bit in there uh through that opening in the boot so unfortunately i don't have any of them here i'm gonna have to order a new ball joint or a new control arm and replace all that before i put the rest of the car back together [Music] so i picked up this uh replacement control arm thanks to the magic of video editing

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youtube.com/pb_garage/front_suspension_full_disassembly_and_rebuild_smart_fortwo_451_2008_2015 · p. 3 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

and the next step is to remove the stock one with this bad um ball joint it's actually it's not bad yet but just the the torn boot it's gonna go bad eventually so the way to do that so if you have a look here towards the front of this control arm you'll notice there's a nut holding the clamp the steel clamp that holds the sway bar in place so first we're going to remove that nut and then we're going to swing this whole uh bracket for this uh sway bar out of the way just up and out of the way and then under that bracket there's gonna be a bolt head there and to remove it um you know it we can just spin it right out and it'll come out this way but we have to hold there's a bar that's really tough to see here underneath the control arm so right here there's um like a little support that goes between the two bushings on the control arm uh inside of the steel frame that holds the control arm in place so it's got um a hexagon on either end here that you can put a wrench on to hold it in place and then you can spin that bolt out of the front and then at the back here there's also another bolt so if we have a look here right at the back of that control arm you can see the head of the bolt right there i'm going to be able to spin that guy out uh again having to hold that um little support that's in between them and then with those two bolts out this one's a little bit tricky because it's it is kind of a long bolt and you've got some stuff in the way here but we'll spin that out as far as we can and that should be enough for me to pull this control arm out of the way [Music] [Music] so now that we have that old control arm out we can go ahead and put the new one in so i'm just sliding it into place putting the two bolts in on either end now with those two bolts in um i'm leaving them just loose they're not tightened up and you'll see the reason for that in a little bit so we're gonna throw our strut assembly back together put our knuckle on our ball joint there just get the nut on to kind of hold it in place and then i'm going to support the weight of the car on the control arm so i'm lifting the control arm up with the bottle jack just to the point where the weight of the car is completely on that control arm for that side of the car so when it starts to lift off of my jack holding the car up once that's done i can go ahead and i can tighten up the bolt uh or the nut that's on the ball joint there and i can tighten up my control arm bolts now the reason i waited until now to tighten up those control arm bolts is because you want that those bolts to be tight just as that control arm is sitting where it's going to sit normally with the weight of the car on it if you tighten those bolts up with the control arm down um then when you when the car is sitting on its wheels what's going to happen is it's actually going to tear your bushings up really quickly so we're going ahead putting our speed sensor back on and then the brake caliper and bracket then we're going to go ahead and put our sway bar end link and attach that to the strut tighten that guy up and now i'm going to swap out that tie rod end so i've just cracked the tie rod end loose from the inner tie rod end i'm gonna spin that guy off and one thing to notice here i've got a little bit of a difference in length between the end of that outer tie rod and the post which means that when i go to spin that on i actually have to reset the nut a little bit differently obviously we're going to go and get an alignment after this work has all been completed but just to get us to that alignment center we want to make sure that that is as close as possible to straight so i'm just checking there to make sure i've got the right length drop that tie rod into the knuckle tighten that nut up and then i need to tighten that jam nut up against the tie rod end now when i got to this point i noticed it was just going to give me a hard time so i put a little bit of heat into it and that got it nice and loose so i actually spun it uh towards the

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youtube.com/pb_garage/front_suspension_full_disassembly_and_rebuild_smart_fortwo_451_2008_2015 · p. 4 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

center of the car first just so i could clean things up and apply a little bit of grease onto that thread there and then spin that jam nut back out and tighten it up so that's it for our little suspension video guys um hopefully you enjoyed it hopefully learned a little bit about how the front end of the smart car goes together and how to take all of that apart if you need to replace the springs if you need to replace those rubber isolators on the tops of the struts if you need to change out a control arm or some of the bushings that ball joint if you need to change your tie rod ends or even just to help diagnose you know where that noise is coming from in the front end of your car now you know how to do that and hopefully you guys enjoy these kinds of videos if there's anything in particular you'd like to see make sure to let us know i've got lots of these to work on so if you need to see anything in particular i'd be happy to do some work and hopefully make another video that you guys can enjoy and we'll see you next time [Music] so [Music] you