How To Replace Front Shock Absorbers 1997-2003 Ford F150 4x4

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So in order to start this project you want to go ahead and loosen the wheel and the lug nuts here. We're going to use a breaker bar with a 19 millimeter socket. So next we're going to go ahead and raise and support your vehicle. You can use a jack and jack stands. In this case here we're using a lift to make it a little bit easier. Just go ahead and remove the lug nuts here just by using that socket because we've already loosened those. With the lug nuts removed we can now go ahead and remove the wheel and tire.

We're going to go ahead and replace this front shock here. We're going to start with the upper mount area. If you notice, there is nut right here and there is a nut on the top to obviously secure and squeeze the bushings up here on the upper mount. We have a 18mm wrench to fit on this here. You may need to use this to prevent this from spinning around. It will fit right on there. In this case here, I'm going to go ahead and use our 17mm deep socket to fit over that stud and the upper nut with a ratchet wrench. I'll set this over here. I'm going to go ahead. We can see that the shock itself is not spinning so we don't have to – there we go. And that's where our wrench comes in. We're going to rotate that until it actually hits the upper mount right there and use that as leverage.

Let's go ahead and work on the bottom, removing this nut and bolt application from the bottom of the shock. What we're going to use is a standard ratchet. This is going to be a 3/8” drive with an 18mm deep socket. That's going to slip right on here. On the inside bolt head is going to be a 13mm. We'll go ahead and loosen and remove this bolt here. This bolt should slide right on out.

All right, so we might have to use a little pry bar here to try and get underneath. There we go. You got to put the pry bar right underneath the bottom of the shock tube and you can lift that right up and compress that. Pull it right up and out of the way. The shock should come right out for you.

Here we have the old part and the new part. You can see the new upper bushings and the nut with the locking nut on top of the threaded rod. On the bottom here, you have your new bushings already pressed in with the medal sleeve. Let's go ahead and get this installed.

You want to go ahead and remove this lock nut, then the main nut. You want to pay attention to the way that this is put together because this is the way that it needs to be installed on the vehicle. I'm going to go ahead and slip the bushings off here. You can see that these are designed so one has a little protrusion right here and it needs to sandwich the chassis as that comes off. You'll see how these go into the chassis on the installation.
Make sure that you have your metal sleeve on the bottom, the cup, then you have the bushing facing upward on that. Drop that right in through the top, into the lower control arm. Just line that up inside. Align that so it comes up and you can see it poke up through the top of the mount.

As you can see right here, the stud doesn't protrude all the way through the upper mount here but we have to get this busing and this steel plate on. You can see that it's not going to clear. Okay? Obviously, we still have to get the nut and the locking nut back on this. If we come on down here, you can actually see we're going to go ahead and raise the control arm. You can do this by using your regular jack because your vehicle will be supported by jack stands. We're basically going to compress the suspension a little bit, enough to push that shock stud right up through the mount.

Now that we have the shock up and pressed up inside, we have enough threads to fit this bushing through. Make sure that fits inside. Go ahead, put that nut on. This particular one is a 17mm. It might vary from the one in your vehicle with the shock that you're installing. I'm going to go ahead with a ratchet and a socket and snug this up. A good rule of thumb is you want to basically snug this up to the point where this rubber bushing and the lower bushing itself expand out to the diameter of the steel washer or maybe a little bit larger. That should be good right there. Pretty solid.

I'm going to go ahead and crank this up to line up the lower bolt hole with the shock itself. Okay, just going to use a small hammer and tap that bolt right through. Just use gentle taps because you don't want to mushroom out the head of that bolt over there. Okay, because we're reusing the factory bolt and nut, it's going to be an 18mm nut with a 13mm head for the bolt. You want to go ahead and tighten this up.

We're going to go ahead and install the last nut. This is actually a lock nut. That's actually going to thread right onto the top there. You can use a wrench on this here and you can use your ratchet on the top one and basically you just want to hold that there until that snugs up. Now we're going to go ahead and lower the lift or your jack.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the tire. I'm going to go ahead and reinstall the lug nuts here. You want to get a few threads caught on all of these here. These lug nuts are 19 millimeters. So we're just going to snug these, bottom it out. Bottom the wheel out to the rotor. We're going to lower the vehicle down onto its own weight, and then do a final torque. With the vehicle on the ground, we're going to do a final torque of the wheel which is between 83 and 112 foot pounds. We're going to do it in a star pattern. All right, just double check the first one. She's all set.

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