Howdy gang!

I haven't been posting anything here for at least a couple of months since none of my trucks have been needing any serious repair. My wife's 2000 Blazer had been needing a front-end rebuild for at least six months and I finally took the time to get it up on jack stands and start fixing it. With the help of my buddy Alex we replaced the sway bar links and bushings, tie rods, and upper and lower control arms with new ball joints and bushings. A few things were stuck due to age and corrosion but mostly the job went pretty well.

I rolled back under the truck to put the torsion bar key blocks back in place and realized that when we put the torsion bars back in the lower control arms we forgot to keep the torsion keys level. They're hanging straight down so we need to remove the torsion bars from the lower control arms and put them back in the correct way so they can be properly tightened.

Can I just remove the lower control arm from the frame and leave the ball joint attached or do I need to remove the ball joint as well? I don't really want to take everything completely out if I can avoid doing so. Any thoughts?

 

Can't you just pull it at the crossmember?

 

I was going to try that but the torsion bar keys were turned over so far that they were covering the nuts holding the torsion bar holder onto the frame. What I ended up doing was completely removing the lower control arms and turning the torsion bars back to the correct position.

It wasn't so bad removing the lower control arms again. Since only a couple days had passed from when they were first installed nothing had seized up or rusted so everything came apart easily. Since I still had the Blazer up in the air I took the opportunity to replace the torsion bar carrier mounts. I still have to replace the Pitman arm which I'll be doing in the next couple days.

 

thats what i had to do with mine. i put all new front end parts on my 04 and i kept the key level on driver side without even knowing. put all the new parts on passenger side and was excited because all i had to do was add torque to the key.. well guess what. i didnt keep that one level. well my bars will not come out of the keys but will (especailly now since i got new parts) will come out the control arms. so thats what i did. unbolted the RF control arm and re-indexed. now the issue i have is the RF tosion key is all the way compressed but still sags on the RF side. im lost. is my bar bad...