2004 Mazda 3 S Front & Rear 4 Piece Shock Absorber Set TRQ SBA60170

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on our 2011 Mazda 3 and I want to show you how to replace a front strut and a front strut cap. We're going to reuse this spring. I'll show you how to do it. It's going to be fairly simple. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

All right. So now that we've got our hood up, we're going to be ready to go so we can get to these bolts under here in a little bit. We're going to come over to our wheel. Okay? If you don't have an air gun or an impact gun of any type of sort, you're going to use your 21 millimeter socket. You're going to put them on your lug nuts and just break them all free. Okay? You don't want to loosen them up, take them completely off with the weight of the vehicle on there. You just want to break them free. Once they're broken free, then you can continue.

Okay, so we're going to take off our lug nuts, 21 millimeter. Just put the fourth one on just a little bit so I can take off the fifth. Now that I don't have to worry about the wheel falling off, I can put away my other lug nuts and my tool. We'll set this aside.

Okay. So now what we're going to do is we're going to get our brake hose. This is the brake flex hose off of this bracket. There's a little clip right here. Yours may or might not move that much. Generally speaking, they don't. Just grab it with some cutters or pliers, whatever you need, wiggle it and pull it off. That's what it looks like. And grab our hose, just pull it down and pull it right out of the front strut.

Over here we have our ABS wire. This is very delicate. Okay? So when we go ahead and we take the strut out of here and this knuckle comes dropping down, of course we want to try to control it so it doesn't come down too fast or hard or anything, but it could put a little tug on this. What I'd like to do is just grab the ABS wire right at the bracket right here. You can see it's got like a little fork where the wire goes through. I'm just going to slide right out of there. Just grab it, wiggle it, slides right out. Okay. There's a little forky-do. We got another one right here. I'm going to do the same thing there.

Now, look at all this slack we have here. This is going to be great because when this comes down a little bit, we don't want to put a tug on this. We're going to remove this nut right here. It's a 14 millimeter and this holds your front sway bar link to the strut unit and of course this bracket as well. All right, 14 millimeter. Blast that off of there. Here's the bracket. It's kind of weighted. This is probably just for vibration dampening. We'll set this aside with the nut and we'll move along to the next step.

We'll get our sway bar link out of there. We'll just set that right aside. We still got plenty of slack with this. Now we're going to move ahead. We're going to loosen up this axle nut right here. This is a 32 millimeter. After we loosen that up, we're going to try to drive the axle through the wheel bearing so that that way there when we go ahead and move this knuckle down, we'll be pulling the axle through the wheel bearing instead of trying to separate the CV joint boots right along here. Last thing I want to do is replace an axle due to a careless mistake. Okay. It's not very hard. 32 millimeter socket. This will come right off.

So now we're going to use a little bit of penetrant spray. Just come right along in here. And maybe at this point you have access to an air chisel with a punch bit. You go right in that little groove right there in the center. That's going to make it so this thing won't jump around. Go crazy on you. Okay? Could you use this. Maybe you don't have access to something like that. These are available on 1aauto.com by the way. You could just take the axle nut, put it back up on here so it's as close to level with the axle as you can, but still has plenty of room back there. Take your little hammer and just give it a couple of loving bonks. Bonk, bonk. See if you can get that axle to drive in a little bit. Once it starts moving, you can stop bonking.

See how it's going in a little bit? Just like that. Easy peasy. It's moving nice and free now. Okay? The purpose of putting the nut on there, I'm sure you can figure it out, but when I was bonking this, I didn't peen over any of these threads, right? So that way there, when it comes time to put the axle nut back on, easy peasy.

So this right here is your pinch bolt for your knuckle to strut. Okay? This bolt right here goes through this part of the knuckle and then through the backside of the knuckle there and it squeezes the knuckle together up against your strut unit. This is a 17 millimeter head. We'll remove that. It's what our pinch bolt looks like. You want to check it, make sure it's not rotted. It doesn't look like it's falling apart or anything like that. It's not super fitted. The threads are still in great condition. This looks great. I'm going to set it aside and I'll reuse it.

All right, so I'm going to use a little bit more penetrant here because, well, why not? Any help I can get. There we are. Now this part is super important. Like I said before, this wire right here is super sensitive. Okay? It's got a fine wire inside there, and that meter is how fast this wheel's turning. So it's going to tell your ABS this wheel's going 30 miles an hour, that wheel over there it's going 30 miles an hour. If you bonk it and you mess it up, it might get a zero reading, you're going to get an ABS light. Your red brake light might come on. It could be issues. Okay? In which case you just replace this, which can be costly, but it's not very hard generally speaking.

So what I'm going to do, just hold it aside. I'm making sure that I'm not going to bonk anywhere on it. And I'm just going to hit right here on the knuckle with my small hammer. The knuckle's starting to come down off of the strut unit. So I'll continue. Still going. I can see the penetrant working its way in there. I'm just going to hit it again.

We're going to continue doing this until the strut comes completely out the top here. At that point, the knuckle is going to want to come folding down. Like I said before, make sure you don't put any tug pressure on this thing. And you also want to pay attention to your brake hose. So I'll continue with hammering this down.

So this started all the way up here. You can see the line. We're making good progress here. If you have an air chisel and you want to use a flat bit on this, that might work out great for you. For the purpose of this video I'm just going to keep on bonking. Here we go. Just about to break free here. Okay, make sure we push our axle through, right down along there, making sure we have plenty of slack here. Here we go. Just push the axle through a little bit more. Awesome.

Okay. Now what I'm going to do, I'm just going to grab something to hold this up real quick so I don't have to hold it with my hands while I'm trying to work. Okay, so we got this tied up. We have no pressure on the brake flex hose or the ABS wire. Okay. The axle is pushed through far enough that I don't have to worry about putting a tug on any of this. My CV joints are ready to separate. I'd say we're ready to move along. We'll get up to the top. We'll take out the mounting bolts.

Okay, so I'm going to use my 14 millimeter and I'm going to take off these three bolts. Okay? We've got our first bolt. The second bolt, same as the first. I'm just going to take it, put it in a few threads here, make sure it's definitely not coming out. That's just going to make it so when I take this one out, when the strut wants to come down, that's going to hold it for me. Bolt number three, same as the other two. Now I can safely put my tool away. I'm just going to get down like this. Make sure I got my flex hose out of the way. My ABS wire, this moves around quite a bit. I'm holding up the strut. My third bolt. We'll take this right out of here. Easy peasy.

Okay, so we got this mounted up into our strut compressor here and now it's time to get to work. Okay? Safety glasses of course. Hand protection. Not that that's going to really do too much, but we definitely want to protect our eyes. When you're doing something like this and you're compressing a spring, there's always a possibility that something could go awry. Okay? You never really know what's going to happen, so you want to make sure you don't have any small kids standing here. "What are you doing?" You know what I mean? You don't want anybody around that doesn't need to be around, because if God forbid something happens, you don't want anybody getting hurt. Safety first is the number one priority at 1A Auto. So let's get to doing this.

Now that I've got the compressor all set up onto the spring, I'm going to go ahead and start bringing it down. So what this is doing is it's bringing these coils closer and closer. Once we see up here that it looks like this is breaking free, which it is now, which is great, that means that the spring's getting compressed enough that we'll be able to take off this nut, and that's where the real danger happens. I'm just going to go a little bit more just because I want to make sure that I have zero compression from the spring, forcing these two pieces apart. I don't want this thing coming, shooting off. Okay. I feel loosey goosey here. I feel comfortable with the loosening this up now.

So I'm going to grab my air gun and I'm going to zap this off. This is a 17 millimeter. If it doesn't want to come off just by doing that, we'll have to do something a little different. We'll still continue with our 17, but we'll see about trying to get underneath this rubber boot. I might need to grab bar to get under there and then we'll just hold the shaft on the strut unit itself. So I'll grab my gun. Okay. 17 millimeter. Okay.

It looks like it started to come up and then it stopped. Once it got loose enough that it's just spinning the shaft, that's pretty much the end of it. See if it did anything. Now looks like it might be coming. So I'm going to keep holding up on the strut here, just to make sure that it doesn't come falling down, potentially hurting me. I don't have my foot under there. I'm keeping away as much as possible here.

There's our nut. Set that aside. Take the cap. Here we are. We'll get rid of all those little ball bearings in there. Good thing we're replacing that. Generally speaking, these parts don't come apart right here. That usually stays right connected to the top of this, so it's a good thing that we went on 1aauto.com and got ourselves a new one.

We'll just get this separated just like that. There's our strut unit. It's the upper area. And then of course here's our coil spring. If your coil spring's broken, cracked or whatever it may be, now is the time where you'd go ahead and switch it out, put in your new one, grab your brand new quality 1A Auto strut, your brand new quality 1A Auto mount and get it all put together. Let's move ahead to the next step.

All right, so this plastic piece right here is supposed to come off of this boot. So we're just going to grab it. See if we can twist it and separate it. Waste the stick on there. We'll take this boot off. This piece right here, just give it a little twist. Pops right out of there. This piece is going to get disregarded. We'll recycle it, dispose of it properly, and we'll save these other two parts for our installation.

Over here we have our front shock assembly out of our 2011 Mazda 3, we have our upper mount as well, and over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto parts. These parts are built to the same exact specifications as the original, same shape, same size, same everything. Okay? It's got all the same mounting points. Get this right here for your brake hose. Super important. You turn them, you got the area for your sway bar link, same on the new one. Then of course, right down along here is where your spring's going to go on to, and it even comes with a brand new locking nut.

These parts are the same exact parts as the others, line it up for you real quick. You get the same length. Okay, and over here we have our caps. All right, super important to make sure that we replace these at the same time as the shock assembly. A lot of times when you're replacing these, they'll come right apart. Okay? The bearings inside there, I don't even know if I can get it apart at this point. There should be a little bearings in there. They come apart when you're trying to separate it. It happens. The brand new 1A Auto part comes with brand new bearings under there. It's got the same mounting holes.

With all that said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part or quality parts to install into the vehicle. So I'm going to go ahead and do it. As always, if you need any parts, you can always check us at 1aaauto.com. Thanks.

So I'm just going to go ahead and use a little bit of silicone paste in here. Let's set that aside. That's just going to help me get this boot in there. So I'll just work it. That's in there. So we'll just go ahead and put this back on here. You want to pay attention to the fact that this is a longer side and then this side is just a little bit shorter. It just kind of goes over these nubs right here and locks it in. So just try to force it up on there. You can try to twist as you push. And it looks like I got it all the way around.

Okay. So when you're mounting your new mount onto the shock assembly, you'll notice that the mount kind of goes at an angle sloping area. The coil spring stops right where the slope comes right down to a point and flattens out. Okay? You can see the marking on the old one. So that's where we're going to put the new one. We'll just line this up so the coil goes right to where the slope stops, a little bit back, right there. That feels good. I'm just going to look around. It seems as though it's sitting all the way around now. That looks good.

So now we're going to take this. We're going to come right up through the center here. And if we catch on that boot that we put in there, it's going to want to lift up on your mount. So just make sure you kind of hold it together. I'm just going to start the nut on here. It's got a neoprene lock on there. Okay. So you don't need any thread locker. Perfect.

Right here is where your coil is going to come out to and then sit right along there. Okay, so essentially once you get it up, it's going to go just like that. All right, so we'll just bear that in mind. I'm going to start loosening this a little bit.

Okay, so we're just going to snug this up with our 19 millimeter. I'm using a three heads air gun now. It's a little smaller, but less torque. Okay, it's bottomed out. Now I'm going to go ahead and torque this down. 56 foot-pounds. Okay, so I just grabbed two of the bolts that are the body to mount bolts that we took out of the vehicle. I'm going to take my pry bar, I'm going to go like this, and then I'm going to go ahead and torque this down. 56 foot-pounds. There we are. Torqued 56 with my 19 millimeter socket.

Now I'm just double checking where I have this lined up to make sure that I'm still in the correct area. Like I said before, you want to make sure that you have the end of your coil right where this comes down to, its bottomed out point, okay, where it pretty much evens out with this right here. That looks pretty great. I'm just going to swing this around. All this lined up.

Now I'm just going to go ahead and try to relieve tension here. It's going to go slow till it's pretty much bottoming out here on both sides and then I'm going to double check it. If I need to re situate things, that'll be the time I'll do it. Okay. It feels pretty good. Come up along here. Looks like we're pretty much right at the center area of that. Looks pretty decent. Cool. Good right here. Seeing all the runs coming around here. It's not hanging off any of these lips all the way around. Awesome. Let's continue. Once it starts getting loose, of course I'm going to hold onto it so it can't flop. Cool. All right, we'll get it out of our machine. We'll move along.

Okay, so when we bring our strut assembly over, you'll notice that you've got your mounting hole here, one all the way over there, and then a much shorter distance here, shorter distance there. So you get a long distance and it's semi rounded right there. We'll look at our brand new 1A Auto strut cap. Nice long distance there, semi rounded, short distance, short distance. So we're going to kind of put the point to the triangle facing out and the nice flat area here, the long distance towards the engine side.

We'll come right in and under here, watching out for our brake hoses and cables and everything we have under there. Let's get this kind of set in so it's up where we need it to be. Take a peek. There we are. I'm just going to start in these bolts here. Get two of them started so the assembly can't go anywhere. Now grab the other one real quick. Cool. Now that we've got all those started, we'll go ahead and bottom them out a little bit. We'll put the rest together and then we'll torque them down. Okay. Just bottom it out here.

Okay. All of these are bottomed out. I didn't go ahead and reef down on them. I want to make sure I can torque these down in a little bit. So now what I like to do when it comes time to put in the knuckle up onto the strut assembly, I like to put a little bit of Never-Seez along here. You can use whatever you want. And you can even not use anything if that's what you want. I guess I would say it's your prerogative. I'm going to put this on here because it's going to help me get it off some day in case of 100,000 miles from now I need to go ahead and redo it for some reason and or right now when I'm putting it on, it's going to give me some sort of a lubricant to help slide this up on. I'll make sure we've got plenty of slack here.

I'm going to go ahead and push the axle back in as I push the knuckle forward. There we are. Get that in. Make sure we got this out of the way. We're just going to bring this up, try to line it up with our assembly. This part can be a little tricky. Okay, so at this point you can either use a floor jack if you want to be closer to the ground or a pole jack or whatever you want to use. We're just going to go ahead and use something a little stronger than me to lift this knuckle up. Of course, I want to be careful for the backing plate. Careful for my ABS wire and of course my brake hose there. Make sure that nothing's getting pinched in between. Once we get this, so it looks like it's touching, just kind of wiggle it a little bit, ABS wire a little bit more here. A little bit more pressure, a little wiggle.

Okay, so you'll notice your knuckle has a slot in it and you'll notice your strut assembly has an area that's going to go down into that slot. So before you go ahead and put your knuckle all the way up on there and at that point you won't be able to turn it once it goes up too far, you want to try to line these up as close as possible. Once they're lined up, you'll be clear to continue on pressing your knuckle up further into your strut assembly.

So I like to just keep doing this, every once in a while. Jack it up a little bit. Give it a little wiggle. That should be helping the strut assembly come down. I'm just going to make sure we're lined up. Looks like we're pretty darn close. I'd say I can continue. Okay. I'm almost done right there. Now I'm going to use a punch and my hammer and I'm going to try to drive that up a little bit. Okay, nice. It's working. Okay.

Essentially whatever you have to do to get your strut assembly to work its way into the hole in the knuckle. This is working great. It's starting to slide in. I'm jacking up like this to apply pressure and then I'm using my punch and my hammer to apply vibration. And the two of those together make action happen. Oh yeah. Looking good.

Okay. I can see my strut assembly starting to come down. Now what I want to do is make sure that my bolt hole right here is going to line up with the whole inside of the strut and then I'm going to be able to come through the other side of the knuckle there. So I'm just going to jack it up a little bit more. I'll continue hammering. Looks like I can go quite a bit more here.

All right, I'm going to check that. Okay, so we've got our pinch bolt. You can use a little bit of thread locker if you'd like on this. I do like to use thread locker on something like this, so I used some. We'll say it's your prerogative if you want to or not. I'm going to tighten this down. I'm just going to bottom it out and then we're going to torque it down. It's bottomed. Now we'll torque it. We're going torque this down to 56 foot-pounds. Okay. Torqued 56, 17 millimeter.

Okay, so you'll notice right up on the bracket for where your brake hose goes through, it has a flat area, which is right along where my finger is. Your brake flex hose will also have a flat area, and that'll line up. If you don't have it lined up, the hose won't go up and through. So you just come under, bring it up. As long as you have that flat area lined up where it's supposed to go, you're doing all right. We'll take our little clip, set it in there. Now I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks with whatever I have in my hand, which is this.

Give it a nice little tug. That's going nowhere. There's no way for this hose to flop around, get caught on anything, rub on anything and get torn. It's looking pretty good. Let's move ahead to the next step. All right, so we'll grab our sway bar link. We'll pull it through, just like that. Now we have our bracket with our rubber insulator and the clip for the ABS. This just goes on just like this, and the rubber sits right up against your strut assembly. We'll take our nut, put it on here, just like that. Now we're going to go ahead and tighten that right down. We're going to use our 14, snug this right up. Tight.

Grab our ABS wire. This goes right here, sits right in the groove. It's happy there. It's grooving. Move over here. Same thing for this one. It doesn't seem like it wants to press in. Just try to twist it at the same time. Generally speaking, it'll slide right in. It's super important to make sure that you have your ABS wire into the bracket, not just flopping around. As you turn and the vehicle's moving around doing all sorts of things, this can get pulled around, tugged, yanked, ripped. God knows what. We want to try to protect this. It's integral to your traction control and your ABS and all that. So let's move ahead to the next step.

We have our locking axle nut. This is a self-locking nut. If you are worried about it and you want to use a little bit of thread locker, you can go ahead and do that. For the purpose of this video, I'm not worried about it. I'm just going to start this on here. We're going to use our 32 millimeter socket and we're just going to bottom this out. We're not going to go ahead and hammer it down ... with our air gun, okay? Just zip it in so it's nice and close. And then we're going to torque this down to 202 foot-pounds. And I'll show you that. 32 millimeter socket. Okay, it's bottomed out. Let's bring down the vehicle a little bit. We'll torque it down.

So here we go. We've got our 32 millimeter socket, our torque wrench set to 202 foot-pounds. I've got my bar going across like this. Okay. It comes across flat across the lug studs. I didn't set it up so it's sitting like a diamond and I don't have any pointy edges hitting up against my threads. I want to try to preserve my threads, but I need to use this bar down here. So when I go ahead and try to tighten this down, the wheel's not going to be able to turn or the rotor and hub isn't going to be able to turn. So I'm going to go ahead and do this. 202 foot-pounds. I'm going to go, do one more time here. That's torqued, 202 foot-pounds with my 32 millimeter socket. Let's move along.

So it's time to get our wheel up onto the vehicle now. Instead of going in front of it, grabbing, trying to lift with our back, potentially hurting ourselves, I'm just going to bring it over to my leg. I'm going to lift with my leg and my ab muscles. It goes right up on. Easy peasy. I'll hold the wheel. Grab one lug nut, get it on there. Now the wheel can't go anywhere. I can release it. Grab the rest of my lug nuts. And finish putting these on.

All right, now that we have all these bottomed out, the wheel can't flop around, we're going to bring it down so the majority of the weight of the vehicle is on the ground. We'll torque these down. Okay, so now that we're down on the ground, the wheel's just barely touching, I'm going to go ahead and torque down these lug nuts. I'm going to go 85 foot-pounds with my 21 millimeter socket. I'm going to go into star pattern, criss-cross. Okay. You never want to go around in a circle when you're doing this stuff.

I always like to go around one more time. Doesn't cost me anything. I'm already here. All my tools are out. And for safety sake, why not? The wheel's torqued. We can continue onto the next step.

Okay, so now that we've got the full weight of the vehicle on the ground, we're going to go ahead and torque these down. We're going to go 28 foot-pounds with our 14 millimeter socket. One. Here we are. Let's just hit them one more time. On there. There we are. Easy peasy. To do the other side just repeat the process.

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