One to two hours is more than enough to replace the lower control arm(s) on your 2005+ 2005-2007 Honda S2000. You can do it yourself without having to pay $200-$400 for labor at the dealer or garage, not including parts. I replaced both lower control arms in about 6 hours total because of stripped bolts and alignment problems. The following is how I did it myself so you don’t have to.

Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Aro... Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Around

Tools needed: Floor jack, jack stands, 10mm Allen/hex wrench(s), Phillips screwdriver (long handle power driver is best), 17 mm wrench (or socket & extension), 19 mm wrench (socket or box end wrenches are easiest) and sockets in sizes 22mm, 24mm, 30mm, 32mm. A breaker bar may come in handy for the lower bolt but isn’t required.

Materials needed: 2x new control arms ($120 used on ebay/$170 new dealer), 1x tube of thread lock ($3 auto parts store), and 1x tube of anti-seize paste ($4 auto parts store). The thread lock will keep your nuts from working loose and the anti-seize will keep your bolts from seizing up again down the road.

Here are the steps to replace your lower control arms yourself.

1) Jack up the car high enough until just before the tire rolls off the jack stand(s).

2) Remove the bolts on both sides holding down your sway bar.

3) Remove both sides’ lower control arm(s).

4) Remove the 2 bolts (17mm) holding down your front sway bar and let it hang (you may also remove the end link on each side here).

5) Now loosen and remove both lower ball joints.

6) When reinstalling the new control arms, you might want to remove both ball joints again and take the old ones over to AutoZone or Oreilly’s (or wherever) and buy new ball joint nuts in case yours are stripped like mine were (I believe you can’t re-use these).

I cleaned up my engine bay a bit after finishing this job and painted some of the faces with silver VHT paint since they were looking pretty rusty (they rusted because somebody tried to replace my oil dipstick at one point). After painting them, I let them sit overnight so the paint would fully dry before putting everything back together.