Most Common Strut Installation Mistakes

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 and ring the bell. That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks. Now, let's get this thing off of here. That's safe.