The warranty for the family 2013 R60 S ran out last year, so now I'm the car's primary mechanic. My first job was to replace all four rear control arms with adjustable control arms, after the last alignment could only bring the right rear wheel almost into spec. After that, the rear alignment is dead on--But both left & right tie rod adjustments (threads between inner & outer tie rods) are completely frozen (down-side of road salt I suppose), so my steering wheel is cocked ever-so-slightly.

This means my next job will be replacing both tie-rod assemblies. Book time is 4 hours; so between parts and labor, the shop where I get alignments done wanted close to $1,000. I'm pretty sure I can get the parts for around $200 and tools for ~$300 (this includes a Milwaukee M18 1/2" impact). I also bet that I can beat book time by ~2 hours. This may be hubris on my part, but having replaced tie rods on other vehicles, and having had a really good look at those on my car, I have no Idea why book time is 2 hours per side.

I plan to order parts & tools this week to get to this job done next week or the following week. Since I haven't yet found a how-to thread on NAM, I have a couple of questions for the NAM community:

What job specific tools do I need? Aside form the impact (which I admittedly don't need, but really want) I plan to buy the following:

• Joint separator
  • Super cheap and saves me having to bang on my car with a 5lb sledge
• Inner tie rod tool.
  • I want to be able to torque the new inners, which I can't do with an open end wrench
• 34mm thin profile open end wrench
  • Is this the right size for the R60 S?
  • I know that I can use a cutoff wheel on my angle grinder to separate the inner & outer tie rods, enabling me to remove the inners with the inner tie rod tool. But if possible, I'd like to pull them in one piece so that I can better approximate the length on the new tie rods (so as not to chew my tire tread any more than necessary on the way to my alignment shop)

Is there already a how-to post on this, or should I document and post my process when I do it?

 

Here is a similar DIY. This might give you an idea (I know it is R56, but the steering components are the similar)

https://www.pelicanparts.com/techart...eplacement.htm

 

On my 2012 R60S, the inner tie rod joint takes a 38mm wrench.