Shocks and struts and struts and shocks

The salt is real. The rust is history.

A while back I decided to address a slight ride-quality issue I was having in my 1999 Toyota Camry 2.2L. In brief, it was clunkier that I'd like. Replacing all four shocks and struts was an effective step in solving the condition. While it probably wasn't worth doing on a 20+ year old car, I enjoyed the experience and I found a good price on the parts from Detroit Axle. As always, the first step is to safely raise the vehicle and remove the wheels. If your wheels have already come off, you may skip this step and go directly to purchasing a new car.

Pay absolutely no attention to the tool brand.

 In my case, the sway link here was rusted frozen something horrible. Following internet tips, I used a locking vice grip pliers to grab the stud shaft in order to loosen the nut on the back. Otherwise, the whole stud turns with the nut. Repeat four times all around the car.

German torque specification: "Gutentight".

 With a long breaker bar, the two big bolts broke loose from the wheel hub and I was able to remove them.

Russian torque spec: "Brokenov".

 This bracket holds the flexible brake line to the wheel cylinders on the drum brakes in the rear (and the caliper for the front discs) as well as the ABS sensor wire. One of the two bolt heads holding the bracket to the shock broke off, but we'll solve that later. With the shock and strut disconnected from the wheel hub entirely, go inside the car and remove the top mounting bolts.

Sorry, my car is usually a lot dirtier.

Access to the strut mount is behind the back seat, so the bottom cushion comes up. It just pops up off a tab on each side. Give 'er a good tug. 

Don't lose it. 

 With the seat out of the way, you have access to this bolt which holds in the shoulder cushion under the seatbelt.

She's come undone.

Again, a pair of small Japanese hands would have helped here.

 Over the should of each passenger is the strut mounting plate. Three nuts hold the strut in, not too difficult to remove, but they are awkward to get a wrench or a socket on. I ended up ripping the old insulating fabric out of the way and had to fight over the wire harness.

Y'know that thing that happens when you hit a bump really hard and your whole car starts riding funny?
This plate breaks through to the inside of the car because of rusted, weak steel.

 With the strut removed, we can see the inside of the mounting plate. The strut itself is a one-piece unit, so it comes out all at once, spring and shock together. You can service them separately, but it's a pain in the ass, takes longer, and more dangerous to play around with high tension springs. You might save on parts in the shop, but I bet you the labor hours goes up.

 The new strut/shock (they call it s quick-strut for the all-in-one assembly) is difficult to line up with the mounting plate above and the large bolts below at the same time with only one pair of hands. It's also heavy and awkward to move around.

It worked didn't it?

 I was wrong before. Both the bolt heads broke off and needed replacements. I spent part of the afternoon shopping at a hardware store looking for something similar and finding the closest match. The smaller bolt is very awkward.

Installation is the reverse of removal.

 That completes one side of the rear strut replacement. Same stuff on the other side, but everything gets twisted the other way.

Iron oxide futures are up.

 The order of operations on the front side are very similar, so the rest might look more like a slideshow with shitty captions.

Take the thing off the thing.

Unbolts the things.

Don't forget to put some threadlocker on the big ass bolts what fer keepin' the wheels on.

Et voilà.

I also used a wire wheel to clean up the crusty threads on those bigger bolts. I think the new struts came with new mounting nuts because they had nylon inserts originally. Torque everything to specifications (found online or helpfully included with the new parts). Nothing has fallen off yet, so I think we did good!