Daewoo Nubira Control Arm Replacement

A Step-by-step Guide to a Tricky Bit of Routine Maintenance

Two decades ago, most passenger cars had zerk fittings at each joint on the undercarriage, to be pumped with grease at each oil change. Nowadays most cars feature sealed joints taken to be lubricated for life. This means that, after tens of thousands of miles, they can be quite creaky and feel "sticky" in cold weather.

The Daewoo Nubira, a compact car sold in the United States from 2000 to 2002, starts getting noisy around 75,000 or 80,000 miles, due to worn-out, corroded ball joints, ruptured stabilizer link seals, and sometimes also due to worn-out tie rod ends. The ball joint is permanently fixed to a heavy steel bar which is in turn riveted to the control arm. The control arm must be removed in order to replace the ball joint. One may either remove the arm, drill out the rivets with a 12 mm bit, and replace the ball joint, or replace the entire assembly; Daewoo Motor America sells new control arms with riveted ball joints and pre-installed bushings. Replacing the joint only is less expensive by a factor of four; installing new control arm assemblies has the advantage of replacing what are perhaps the most heavily used bushings on the vehicle. Authorized Daewoo service centers tend to prefer the latter.

Daewoo makes the dealer service manual, with thorough, illustrated step-by-step instructions for most maintenance and repairs, available for purchase at a steep discount. This can be more useful in some cases than in others; the instructions for e.g. timing-belt replacement or, emissions diagnostics call for specialized widgets available only to dealers. I discovered that the instructions given in the dealer service manual for removal and installation of the control arm assembly are simply incorrect and that both disassembly and reassembly are impossible if they are followed to the letter. After struggling with the driver's side for far longer than the repair should have taken, I, largely through trial and error, came to a more thorough understanding of the procedure, and replacement of the passenger's side consequently took far less time.