Oh, doggone it. Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So today in the studio, I wanted to talk to
you about some common and potentially dangerous mistakes that you can make when you're trying
to install front struts on your vehicle. Let's talk about it. So, I was out this weekend and I was going
to get some blueberry bushes. The only problem with those things is the
ones I got. Oh gosh. Oh, no. Great. I was distracted. Unbelievable. Let's get this out of here. All right. So, these mistakes happen. I wasn't paying attention, I was talking to
somebody while I'm trying to do this. Obviously, you wanna try to be as safe as
possible. And another thing I noticed, I was wearing
my safety glasses but in the wrong spot. Great. Anyways, we're going to jack this up a little
bit and get ready to start doing this strut. Couple of other places that you definitely
don't want to put a jack or a stand, one of them might be underneath the control arm. You can see that this is at an angle, especially
when it's hanging, not to mention if you're gonna be replacing the strut, you don't want
any upward pressure on this control arm. Aside from that, draining pan, oil pan, exhaust,
pretty much anything else, except for something that's solid like the subframe, the pinch
rail, which is right along here, or I guess if you had to, you could try to add a little
bit of support right along this area here. Now, these bolts just don't come loose. So I'm gonna go ahead and heat them up. Oh, wait a minute. Okay. So, obviously, heating up this nut right here
to help break it free probably isn't the best idea, especially if you still have your brake
hose, your ABS wire is still connected. Not to mention this is a gas-filled strut
right here, so by adding heat to this, you could potentially cause some serious damage
and even an explosion in severe cases. Commonly when replacing struts, you might
find that your sway bar link is directly attached to it. So, of course, you're going to have to remove
the nut that holds the stud to the strut. Of course, the nut isn't gonna come off. What am I going to do? Let's try some locking pliers back here. Wait a minute. Oh yeah. So, this isn't coming off. I'm gonna try to heat it up. Oh, here we go again. As you can tell, using locking pliers on the
backside of this to hold the stud or even trying to heat it up with a torch, probably
isn't the best idea. It's gonna end up ruining the sway bar link,
so you're going to have to replace that at the same time as doing the strut, which, of
course, it's gonna cost you a little bit more money. The best way to do this is if you look in
the middle of the stud here, you can tell that it has an Allen head area. Typically, it's either going to look like
that or even something that you can put another socket on, and then you can wrench this off. Essentially, you just want to hold that stud
and then spin the nut off. Let's go ahead and separate this. That was a horrible idea. I just pulled apart my CV joint. Let's have a look at what's going on inside
of your CV axle. This right here would be approximately where
that boot would be, that we just end up pulling on. As I pull this apart, you can tell that it
has bearings inside. Obviously, if I end up pulling this apart
and then I try putting it together while there's a boot, maybe I can get it lined up, maybe
I can't. There's always the possibility that this could
end up popping off of here. If it pops off and all those little roller
bearings fall off of there, you can imagine you're gonna have a serious issue with your
axle. Now, not only did I potentially damage my
axle and my boot, but I also put a big tug on my brake hose right here. Also, I might've potentially put a tug on
this. This is my ABS wire, and it's very delicate. So, how can we avoid this situation? What I would do is just come right out here
and remove the axle nut. Use a punch and a hammer, break this free. Also, you want to take off any other mounting
points that hold your brake hoses, or, of course, ABS wires. That's gonna give everything plenty of slack. Now we can move along to removing our mounting
bolts here that hold the knuckle to the strut. Something to pay attention to is the direction
that they came out of. You wanna make sure when you put them back
in, they're facing in the same direction. Also what you might happen to notice, which
doesn't really show on this one, you might potentially have alignment adjustment bolts
or cam bolts. Essentially, what you would find on that is
it's not a round-looking bolt like this, it would be a little bit more oblong, almost
like an egg-type shape. The reason for that is because the alignment
professional is going to be able to go ahead and turn this and that's gonna make it so
this can angle like this. So, if you do happen to find that one of your
bolts has that oblong shape to it, you wanna make sure that it goes back in the same hole. If you end up messing it up, it's going to
cause a severe issue with your alignment, especially for the alignment professional. So, now that we know we have plenty of slack
on our wires and our hoses, let's just go ahead and take this out of here, and we'll
let this come down. Now that we have the lower aspect apart, let's
get back up top. Let's start by removing our center nut here. Wait a minute. Great. Well, that was the third stupidest thing I've
done so far. Boy, this isn't going well at all. At this point, look what I did. I just completely crushed my ABS wire, I damaged
my axle boot here, and, of course, I damaged my tie rod boot. This is getting to be a big mess and it's
going to be a big job overall. How am I gonna get this out of here now? Oh, geez. What I should have done is not touch that
center nut at all, but just remove these three mounting bolts up along the top. And then, of course, you just reach underneath,
grab onto that strut, remove your last nut up here, and then you can lower this right
down. Now, I guess you could say in this situation,
I got a little lucky. And the reason why I'm saying I got a little
lucky is because I didn't actually get hurt, which is good. Because if you could imagine, the amount of
spring tension that this was under when it came shooting apart, if I had the complete
strut out and in my hands and I touched that center bolt and started removing it, this
is gonna make it come shooting apart and it could potentially hurt me or even kill me. Now, obviously, compressing or decompressing
the spring when you're dealing with your struts is gonna be one of the most unsafe portions
of this job. A lot of times, most people aren't necessarily
gonna have a big old machine like this that they can put the spring into and compress
it. This is gonna be the safest way. Of course, I'm always wearing hand protection
and eye protection. That's just the way I am. Aside from that, what people more than likely
will have are something that looks more like this. They've got a couple of little hooks on them
and essentially, would just go around the coil like this and then, of course, you could
squeeze it right together. Well, this is great and everything in exception
of the fact that if you were to look at these coils, they come down at a slant and it keeps
coming down and around. They're not perfectly straight across. So, with that said, after I start tightening
this, it could potentially keep sliding down, down, down. And then if both of them came to one side,
you can imagine that this coil is gonna be bent like a horseshoe. So, now before I start taking this apart,
I just wanted to go over the importance of having a tool that's gonna be able to compress
the spring right here. The spring is gonna be forcing the strut in
this direction. It's trying to separate it. So, of course, if I was to just take off this
nut, the strut and everything's just gonna come shooting right apart. Now that I have this all completely torn apart,
let me ask you a question real quick. Does it make sense to just go ahead and replace
only the strut without the spring and, of course, without the nut along the top? Let's just keep this old stuff inside here. That really makes sense to me. Or does it make a little bit more sense to
just go ahead and get yourself a complete strut assembly right here? Something like this is gonna be amazing, you
don't have to do very much work at all. You've already done all the hard part. Aside from that, the only thing that I would
mention is if you're gonna do one side, you're gonna want to do the other. And that's the case, whether you're just replacing
the strut or, of course, the whole assembly. Now, by only replacing one strut, you might
find that your car is sitting off-kilter like this. You can imagine that this is going to be very
unsafe for you driving down the road. This could affect the steering and the stability
of your vehicle while you're driving. Why might someone even want to replace only
the spring, only the strut, or only even the mount? Well, of course, if you were to look at this
one, you might find that you have a broken spring on this, but for some reason, the rest
of the strut looks like it's fairly decent if not okay. Well, why not just replace the spring, save
a couple of bucks, right? Or even maybe, you look inside here and you
can see that you have fluid coming out of there, but the spring itself still looks decent. And, of course, the cap, well, you know, sure,
that looks fine as well. So, like I said before, let's save a couple
bucks and just go about doing it the hard way. For me personally, I'm just gonna go ahead
and get myself a complete strut assembly, get it as a pair, and then, of course, once
it's all fully installed, which is gonna be much easier than doing it the hard way, I'll
just go ahead and get myself an alignment and be down the road. Now, when it comes time to putting it all
back together, you want to make sure that your spring is lined up with the area that
it needs to be. So, essentially, if you were to look at your
strut, typically you can see like an area where it has a little bobble, that's exactly
where the end of the spring needs to be. If I put it like this and tighten this up
and drive down the road, there's always the possibility that this is gonna shake like
that. And then, of course, you're gonna find that
your alignment and everything else just gets all out of whack. Now, obviously, using this half-inch air gun
right here to go ahead and snug this up and then really reef it down, that's gonna cause
a very big possibility of damaging your bearing that's located inside this cap right here. Commonly, when you go ahead and tighten this
down and you start squeezing down the bearings on there, they're gonna start to bind up,
and, of course, when you're driving down the road and you start to make a couple of turns,
you're gonna hear like [vocalization]. So that noise you're hearing is the bearings
essentially telling you that you went ahead and you tightened it down too much and they're
pretty much screaming for help. Just go ahead and snug it and then make sure
that you use your torque wrench. Let's get this strut back in here. Start my bolts on, we'll get back up here
and torque these down in a little bit. Now, when it comes time to putting in your
bolts, you definitely don't wanna go ahead and spray them down with a whole bunch of
copper Never-Seez. But when you do go to put in your bolts, it's
a good idea to add a little bit of copper Never-Seez just along the straight shanked
area here, and then, of course, some red thread locker on the threads. You definitely want to be very careful if
you're jacking up your control arm to try to line everything up. Obviously, I wasn't paying attention and I
jammed the axle right up into the strut. Let's get this thing back together. Whoa. Oh geez. Let's start putting in those bolts. Wait a minute. This doesn't go through from that side. Let's do it from this side. Okay. Now that we have both those in, let's go over
here and get that. Oh, of course, I put it together without putting
the ABS wire on the right side. Come on. Now what? Oh, the axle was not in there. There we go. Cool. Let's get this axle nut on here. Now, it looks like I better go ahead and tighten
this up a little bit more. Tightening your axle nut with an air gun is
very dangerous, especially for your wheel bearing. The reason for that is because, of course,
your axle is gonna come through this hub area here. Behind the hub, there's gonna be a whole bunch
of bearings. You can imagine if I had this together and
then I went ahead and squeezed this down with a whole bunch of pressure like from that air
gun, what's it gonna do to these bearings? It's gonna overheat them because they're going
to be completely compressed. Friction causes heat. And, of course, that causes damage. You definitely wanna make sure that you have
a torque wrench available to be able to torque your axle nut. Okay. So, now let's get the wheel back on here. The next thing that we're gonna do is go ahead
and snug up these lug nuts. We wanna do this in a criss-cross manner. After that, we'll get the wheel back down
on the ground and we're gonna make sure that we torque it to manufacturer specifications. If you don't do it this exact way, there's
always the possibility that the wheel is gonna be off-kilter and every time you hit a bump,
it might potentially loosen up your lug nuts, and then in worst-case scenario, the wheel
falls off. Look. Great. Oh. As you can tell, by not paying attention and
not torquing things the way that I should have, I caused quite a bit of damage to this
car. Don't hammer them on with your air gun. Now, as far as the upper strut bolts are concerned,
you definitely want to make sure that you put these on and snug them with the wheel
on the ground and the weight of the body down on the ground as well. The reason for that is because, of course,
it's gonna make sure that this is settled where it needs to be, and the studs are gonna
be in the fully up position. If I went ahead and tightened this up while
it was still hanging, yeah, I might've gotten it up there. Is it sitting perfectly? I really don't know. Something else to pay attention to though
is, of course, you might potentially skip or even forget about this point. Maybe you're all excited because you just
got it down on the ground. You went ahead and you torque that wheel because
you want to make sure you're safe as possible. You shut the hood and you go out for a road
test. And then what? You're probably gonna hear banging and clanking
over bumps. This looks pretty good. I don't think I need an alignment. What was I saying I don't need an alignment? Of course, I need an alignment. You need to make sure that you get a four-wheel
alignment anytime that you do any type of front end work, whether it's suspension or
even steering. One other thing that I want to mention real
quick, if you have to replace the front struts for anything, why wouldn't you just replace
the rear shocks at the same time? You're driving down the same road with the
front as you are with the rear. It only makes sense to me. Okay, friends, so that's pretty much what
I've got for you for common and potentially dangerous strut installation mistakes. I hope you liked the video. I hope you learned a little something. Maybe you've got a car that you did some struts
on with a little story of your own, if you've got something to talk about, leave it in the
comment section below because I always love to hear from you. Of course, if you liked the video or even
loved the video, make sure you smash on that like button for me. It would mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe
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of our latest content. Thanks. Now, let's get this thing off of here. That's safe.
