A couple weekends ago I decided to swap out the front shocks on my truck with a brand new set. The existing shocks have 140k miles on them so I would think they’re probably due for replacement. I’m replacing mine with a set of Bilsteins that match the original equipment. Here’s the step by step…

Jack up the front of the vehicle. I placed my jack stands underneath each of the control arms.

As you can see… this shock absorber has seen better days. I sprayed a bit of WD-40 on the lower mounting bolt and let it sit there for a few minutes to help it come loose. I did the same thing with the upper mounts.

I first removed the locking nut that holds down the upper insulator. It’s a tight squeeze, but you can access it from the wheel well by pushing back the hard plastic inner liner of the well just a bit.

The end of the top stem is notched so that you can hold it with a pair of Vise-Grips while you loosen the nut with another wrench.

Next you have to remove the mounting bolt at the lower control arm. It helps if you turn your wheels a bit in the opposite direction to give you more room to work. Here I had to use both the Vise-Grip and an adjustable wrench since the bolt is a lot larger than any of the wrench sizes I have.

At this point you should be able to remove the shock absorber:

This is what 140,000 miles on these shocks looks like:

And one of the new replacements:

The new shocks pretty much follow the reverse procedure. I followed Bilstein’s instructions in terms of the order in which to place the various insulators and washers on the stem. Then, I installed the shock absorber by first inserting the stem into the hole at the top of the frame, and then pushing it into position at the bottom bracket.

This next part gets a little tricky… You have use some upward pressure on the shock to align the bottom mounting holes with the bracket on the control arm. I had to use a flathead screwdriver to give me some leverage to push the shock up and insert the lower bolt at the same time.

Once you have that bolt in there, double check that you have the stem and insulator properly aligned in the hole at the top of the frame.

Tighten up your bottom bolt, and following the instructions, place the upper insulator, washer, and locking nut back onto the stem. After installing the shocks, I made sure they both had about 1 5/8″ of stem visible from the top of the locking nut.

And the final product:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Auto Maintenance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.