Replaces
Part Details
TRQ fully loaded shocks and struts are manufactured using premium raw materials and calibrated to restore original ride comfort. TRQ shocks are fully loaded featuring a pre-loaded bearing plate, upper and lower spring isolator, upper spring seat, coil spring, boot kit, and premium strut. TRQ recommends replacing your shocks or struts in pairs to ensure even wear of components and improved ride comfort. All products are fit and road-tested in our Massachusetts R&D facility to ensure we deliver on our promise of Trusted Reliable Quality.
Product Features
Our direct fit gas-charged shock absorbers help restore your vehicle's handling and ride quality to just like new.
Replacing struts used to require specialized tools to compress, remove, and transfer the old spring and mount. Our Pre-assembled, complete strut & spring assemblies come with all new parts and make the job much quicker and easier for the do-it-yourself mechanic.
Strut & spring assembly contains:
Item Condition:
New
Attention California Customers:
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Chromium (Hexavalent Compounds), which is known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov
Lifetime Warranty
This item is backed by our limited lifetime warranty. In the event that this item should fail due to manufacturing defects during intended use, we will replace the part free of charge. This warranty covers the cost of the part only.
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Created on:
Tools used
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Hi I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com, thanks.
In this video, we're going to show you how to replace a front strut and spring assembly on this 2003 Ford Focus, pretty much the same for any 2000 to 2011 Focus. We're going to show you the passenger's side. The driver's side is basically the same procedure. We do always recommend that you replace your struts in pairs.
You'll need new struts from 1A Auto, jack and jack stands, 13 to 19mm sockets with all the accompanying ratchets, extensions and you'll need a breaker bar or pipe for some extra leverage, large hammer. You may need to get off the stabilizer link and nut, you may need a 17mm wrench with a T30 Torx driver. You'll also need some penetrating oil and a torque wrench to put everything back together correctly.
Remove the wheel and tire. You can use your lug wrench that comes with the vehicle. If you're using your lug wrench and hand tools, you want to have the tire on the ground. Loosen the lug nuts first, then raise and support the car and remove the lug nuts. You will need kind of a thin walled socket. Regular impact sockets don't really fit in here.
I'm going to fast forward as I remove the lug nuts, and then, actually, I realize the wheel is stuck on so I thread two lug nuts back on and use a little bit of an alternative method to remove the wheel.
Underneath here, you want to detach a couple of things, the break line pull that out of that bracket. Your ABS sensor, pull that out of here and out of the way. Then, we're going to remove this bolt that holds the upper stabilizer link. First, we're going to spray with some penetrating oil. When we spray that one, we're going to spray the one down here as well that holds the bolt right here that pitches on to the strut and we're going to try to spray the back side of that as much as we can.
Now, a 17mm wrench and put on there and we're going to then hook up the 18mm wrench on like this. It gives us more leverage and we're going to see the nuts actually coming off. What you can do is I have a T30 Torx Driver here. If this starts spinning, just insert that in there and we can hold it steady. It's coming off okay, then hammer. Next is the bolt that holds the strut into the steering knuckle right there. It's a 15mm. Then put a socket with an extension on it to get it clear of this break line. If you have a breaker bar like this, you want to use that. If not, you can use your ratchet. Just use a piece of pipe to give you some extra leverage. I'll just fast forward. You want to take that bolt all the way out. Just spray some penetrating oil where that strut goes in to the steering knuckle.
Get a 15mm socket and disconnect your tie rod in here. The best way to do it is keep the nut as close right up flush with the stud and tie rod. I'm going to repeat the hammer. Once you break the tie rod loose, the stud will start spinning in it so what I did is I took some wood and my jack, jacked up the tie rod into the steering knuckle that holds it in place. I can remove the nut the rest of the way, and then I should just take a light tap and knock the tie rod back out. This vehicle has a broken spring so I actually have lift up on the strut and then hit the steering knuckle until everything comes loose. Then I force the strut up and take the strut out of the steering. Up in the engine compartment, there are three 13mm bolts and they usually come out pretty easy and sometimes they actually break but that's not a big deal if they break off, your new strut assembly comes with new ones.
You can see. Problem with our old strut, right there, a broken spring, not uncommon on these vehicles. This strut is from 1A Auto. It comes all assembled as one piece with the coil spring already on there. It makes it easy to install. I'll remove these. You'll want to put that up in there. I'm going to put it up in there so that this is to the inside. I'm just going to put it in and through here. Take a peek here, just looking at the studs, get them up through. They come up through. Put these bolts on and the nuts. Tighten up the nuts in there. Remember to tighten that with this. Now, continue to be really careful of this harness here. Take care of your strut and your suspension when you're getting that strut right in that groove there. Pull along the strut and pull the steering knuckle out. Push everything together. Now, put a bolt that pinches the steering knuckle back on to the strut in and push on it with your wrench and start it in but don't tighten it yet.
Now, you want to make sure that before you tighten this bolt up, okay, you want to make sure your strut is in the right position. Basically you want to have it so the inside here is just below and then the outside is just flush. The strut is actually indented. You don't want to be too high on the strut. I can probably show you better on this strut here. You can see that the strut comes out and you want to be down below. Your taper is here and you want to make sure you're down below the taper where you tighten it up.
The strut and steering knuckle move around, let's make sure we have it at the right depth. Then use a torque wrench to tighten this bolt between 65 and 70 foot. You're going to put this break back in place, and take your tie rod in and put the wheel over, the tie rod back up in and just kind of put the nut on the tie rod for now to kind of hold it in place and then the stabilizer link here. Get it through. Put this strut back on. As you tighten this up the stud is not spinning, put that back in place. Put that back in place up here. I'm going to fast forward here as I use a jack. Jack the tie rod right on to the tie rod, up into the suspension that holds the stud in place in the steering knuckle. Then you tighten up the nut and torque it to 55 to 60-foot pounds. Put the wheel back on.
I'm going to fast forward here. Put the wheel on. Make sure you thread the lug nuts on a few turns, finger-tight just to make sure that they're not cross threading. Then tighten your lug nuts up preliminarily and then you're going to put the vehicle on the ground and torque the lug nuts. You want to torque the lug nuts to a 100-foot pounds and give me a crossing pattern.
These nuts up here, torque between 25 and 30-foot pounds.
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Tools used
Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2001 Ford Focus and I want to show you how to do a rear shock. It's going to be a very easy job and I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you end up needing this or any other part you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
Okay, so we're inside the back of the vehicle now. We need to get this panel right here off. There's a few Phillips head screws, one, two, three. We're going to remove those. We're going to give this a little tug. There's going to be a little push clip behind this panel, but I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get it out without having to remove that panel as well.
This is what the screw looks like, Phillips head, easy-peasy. Do the same for the other ones here. So here's a hiding Phillips head. Couldn't see it from my angle. Same as the other three. I'll set it aside. Give this a little tug. That's much easier at that point. We're going to try to just pull this aside. There we are. We should be able to get a clear view.
We've got that panel out of the way. Now I'll re-situate here. This is just a little insulation. You can give it a little tug, try not to completely destroy it. This helps reduce noise and all that, so we'll try to keep it in good condition.
This nut right here, we're going to have to remove this. This rear shock does not have a coil spring around it, so you don't have to worry about removing this nut. If you were working in the front of the vehicle you would not touch this, but where we're in the rear and there's no spring around it and underneath, I'll show you what I'm talking about, we're just going to remove this. So I'll grab my tool.
So just a heads up, this is what your rear shock is going to look like. Like I was saying before, it doesn't have a giant spring running around it and, you know, a big mount and everything here. This is just a shock. It's not a strut, okay? It's easily compressed. So without having the spring we don't have to worry about taking off the nut that's located right up top. I'm just going to set this aside.
Right down here you have the 13 millimeter nut. You can go about trying to take that off with a ratchet and extension, 13 millimeter, whatever you want to do. With a ratchet it takes the chance that it's going to spin slowly and you're probably just going to spin this whole upper area as you're trying to take off the nut. If that happens, you can just try to hold it with something.
Personally, I'm going to try to use my airgun. Generally speaking it's much more effective. If you don't have access to an airgun, like I said you can try using your ratchet. You might have to use a little bit of locking pliers or something like that, or you can even try to reach around and try to somehow hold that, or have a buddy or something grab it.
Anyway, I'm going to blast this, reverse it off. So let's say that it didn't come off just like this. It came most of the way off. Maybe I could try to hit it again. Looks like we're getting close. Persistence, right? If I was doing that with a ratchet it would have been darn near impossible. I would have to get under there with some walking pliers and try to hold the... Right around here, try to hold it around the shaft area if I could find it and just try to take that off, okay?
Right now it's off, so now I'm going to get my tools out of here and I'm going to bring the vehicle up so I can get to where the lower bolt is. It comes right through here.
Okay, so we're underneath the vehicle. This right here is your shock. It comes right down and it mounts right here to the rear width lateral arm. This bolt right here is a 15 millimeter. You can use your ratchet with a 15. You can use a wrench. You can use whatever you want. I'm going to go with an airgun. I sprayed right back here where the bolt comes through. A little bit of penetrant spray generally speaking goes a long way.
I'm going to use my 15 and I have access to an airgun. I'm going to use that. Safety glasses of course. When this bolt comes out the shock is going to want to come down because we took that lower... I'm sorry, the upper nut off, so you're going to want to make sure that you're clear. You don't want it to fall down, land on your toe, hit you in the face. I don't want anybody getting hurt, so pay attention to the fact that this is going to fall down.
That's what our bolt looks like. We'll grab our shock, give it a little twist, pull it down. That's what the old one looks like. It looks like up here there's still... The boot's still attached. Pull that down. That should go somewhere like that. We'll take a peek and see if there's anything else up there. I'm sure there's a rubber bushing up inside the vehicle that needs to come out as well, but essentially this is what it looks like.
So here we are friends, a quick product comparison for you. Over here we have our 2001 Ford Focus rear shock. We just removed it. Over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. As you can tell, they're both approximately the same length. They do compress and expand, so if you notice that one seems like it's longer or shorter than the other, well it's just because maybe this one's compressed a little more than that one.
This shock right here is the dead shock. It literally has no more gas inside of it. This one right here is nice and gassed up. I'll show you that in one second. We've got our mounting hole down here. We've got our upper stud right here, but the same as this one, okay? Upper stud, upper stud. This is where it goes through the body of the vehicle. This is where it connects to that lower arm, okay?
This right here... You shouldn't be able to do this necessarily by hand. Theoretically when you push it down it should want to come back up on its own. It's not really doing too much at this point. It's a good thing we're replacing this with a quality 1A Auto part.
With that said, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't want to install this into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need this or any other part you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
So here we are friends. We've got our brand new quality 1A Auto part. I just want to talk to you about something real quick. When you go to install these what you want to do is you want to be able to push this down and activate it. You want to push it up and down if you can three to five times. Sometimes it's going to be a little bit hard to do, okay? Just do the best you can.
This is super important, because you need to activate the gasses inside, get everything worked up. You don't want to hold it sideways like this and try to crush it in, give yourself a chest exercise. It might feel good, but that's not what this is about. That's for the gym. This is for today.
All we want to do, we're going to try to press down on this a little bit. We're going to cut off this little white thing. This is going to want to come up, okay? When it comes up, you're going to want to obviously be careful. We're going to wear some safety glasses. I want to see my kids and my grandkids someday.
I'm just going to press down a little bit. I'm going to cut this white thing, okay? This is going to want to come up a little bit, nice and slow. It's coming up, up, up. We're going to let it do its full thing. Still going. Still going. Okay, here we go. Thank you.
I'm going to grasp the bottom firmly so it can't slip around. I don't want it to punch me in the gut. I'm going to try to pull this down, condense it as far as I can. I'm going to let it come back up. I'm going to do that three to five times. Here we are. Bring it up. This part is going to take a little while.
So right up here is the body of the vehicle. This is where the strut is going to go up and through, and then we're going to put our upper bushing up on top and then the nut. So what you want to pay attention to is just to make sure that there's nothing there. You want to be able to see bare metal. If you have plastic or any other sheathing that was supposed to be part of the old shock you want to make sure you remove that. Now that we know that's removed let's get to putting in the new shock.
So we got a nice little bag of goodies with our shock. The way you're going to do this, you're going to take one of your washers, you're going to take one of your bushings... You want to put the thicker end facing towards your washer. Then you're going to have the body of your vehicle. This is going to go up into the body. You're going to be inside the trunk at this point. You're going to put the skinny end down up against the body of the vehicle, then your washer, then your brand new locking neoprene nut. It's essentially going to look like this.
So here we go. I'm going to put the shock in the hole up in the body up there that I told you about. We've got our bolt. I cleaned up the threads. Just going to bring it through. If you want to you can use a little bit of thread locker. It's your prerogative. You do you, boo-boo. Let me get that started.
We're going to tighten this up. I'll get you the torque spec. First we're going to bottom it out. So we're going to bottom this out using our 15 millimeter. Now we're going to torque it down to 85 foot pounds. Getting close. Here we are. Do it one more time. Torqued.
Now we'll bring the vehicle back down. We're going to put the weight of the vehicle back on the wheel here. We'll get everything set up, our bushing and our washer and then our nut, and then we're going to torque that down as well.
Okay, so we've got the wheel on the ground, right? We're creating force, forcing this in the upward position. It's pressed up against the body nice and firm. We're going to take our bushing, skinny end down. Then we're going to take our washer. We'll put them right on this stud just like this. We're going to take our locking nut. We've got the plastic neoprene there. That's going to face up.
We'll start this on here, then we're going to bottom it out, and then we're going to torque it down. I'm going to bottom this out with my 17 millimeter. I'm going to start it on there. There we are.
Okay. So to torque this down you want to torque it to 13 foot pounds. You might notice that it's hard to torque down, because when you try to tighten up that nut the shaft is going to spin. Well, the best thing that I would say to do is if you have access to an airgun you're just going to kind of blast it on, okay?
The size of the new nut is a 17 millimeter. When you have your bushings inside the vehicle you've got your washer on top and the body right here. As you tighten down your nut this going to start to squish down. You want it so that it's touching, it gives it a little squeeze, but it doesn't flatten right out like a pancake.
Like you don't want to see just that much of the bushing and just a big old squished out pancake. That's no good. You put too much pressure on your rubber bushing, it's going to wear out really quick. Just make it so it gets a little squeeze, it's completely touching. You should be good to go. The torque spec for it is 13 foot pounds.
So it's time to get this back together. We've got our insulation back up on here. We'll lift this up and slide this in. It should sit pretty flush up against there. Bring this over. The seatbelt goes up and over this lip right here. This piece has a little push clip under here. If it pops up on you like this one is you just unscrew the center area, pull out the center, that outer edge should come out. Set that aside. Okay. We'll put this back on in a second, but we'll continue with what we're doing first just so we don't have to do it again.
This goes behind here. That looks pretty good. Okay, just going to come up along here. You should have some bolt holes. Let me see if I can find them. There. Get the last one started here. I'm just going to go ahead and start tightening them up now that they're all started. Snug. Pushing that back up real quick. Let's try to get it right.
Yeah. How I'm going to snug them up again. There we go, one... There should be four. There's one up here. This one. This one right here. Okay. Cool. If your bulb became disconnected from your lens assembly you're just going to put that in. This goes right along the backside corner there. Let me see if I can get it. Might have to pop this lens out. That'll make it a little easier. Here's our lens. This is just going to go in, twist, there we are. Get it back in. Take my glove with it. That's fine.
Okay. We've got this cover. Your seatbelt is going to come through this area. The whole thing is going to have to slide from the forward back. It's got a hooky-do, hooky-do, hooky-do. It goes like this, okay? So get it lined up, grab your seatbelt, put it up and in. That's ready to go.
Get everything lined up. Give it a little bonk. Bonk, bonk. That's my thing. My little push pin. This goes underneath. There we are. Feels good. All right. Let's get our tools out of here. Easy-peasy.
And now that we've completed this side, we're going to do the same to the other side. You always want to do stuff like this in pairs. It's just a good habit, right? Easy-peasy. We know how to do one side, we can do the other.
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