How to Replace Rear Coil Spring 2004-12 Chevy Malibu

Okay, friends. The first thing you need to talk about anytime you're working on your vehicle is safety. You want hand and eye protection. With that said, safely raise and support your vehicle so the wheels are off the ground. Once you've done that, we're going to remove all five of our 19-millimeter lug nuts. Remove your wheel. When we raise the vehicle, we want to make sure we have the suspension so it's able to hang. We also want to make sure that we have an area that we'll be able to get underneath it, to be able to jack it up, and then, of course, let it down in a minute. What I like to do is just feel along the bottom area here and feel where my coil spring ends. And what I mean by that is where these coils come around, it, of course, has to have an end. So, I'm just going to find it, it's right about where my finger is. So, I'm gonna mark it right along the rubber and then right on the control arm, that's where my new coil spring's gonna end, the same exact spot. Now, I'm going to jack this up. And just apply gentle pressure under here. After I've done that, I'm gonna use my 18-millimeter and I'm going to remove this nut and then take out the bolt.

So, now that we have the nut off of here, I just want to bring this up. I'm going to try to compress this spring a little bit. And what that's actually going to do is it's going to take pressure off from that shock. So, that feels fairly decent at this point. What you might notice when you take out this bolt is that it might come springing and separating a little bit. So, just kind of stay back and make sure you're safe. Try using a punch to drive this through. Now, I'm going to lower this down slowly and carefully because it's going to be relieving pressure from the coil. And obviously, we don't want anything bad to happen. You might have to use a little pry bar just to break this free. Pull this down from the top as well. Take this off of there. There's our coil, friends.

I always like to try to put a little bit of grease right along these areas here. That's just where those little bushings are gonna go. Obviously, we want to make sure that they slip on there nice and easy. Now, if you look at these two bushings, you're going to see they're very different. The one that's mostly flat is going to go up along the top. And then the one that has the little nub is going to be along the bottom. I'm gonna line up that mark, put this one right here, that up there as well. Slid right in. Let's grab our new spring and get ready for our install.

Grab a nice long bar like this, come straight in through this control arm and that'll help you pry this right down. Grab your new spring, set it on here. And, of course, we want to make sure that it ends right where we marked it. That's super important. At this point, I'm going to start letting this up. That looks pretty great right there. And now, we're going to carefully jack this up. Just pay attention to the angle of this though. If I'm looking at it, I can tell that there's a potential slipping hazard for the jack. So, just be very careful. I'm going to come right down here closest to the end, jack this right up, and then we'll get this lined up and put our bolt through. Once we have this lined up, let's go ahead and get our bolt in there. Don't forget that it comes from the front to the back. The hardest part is just getting the bolt hole to line up because the knuckle is actually at an angle and, of course, this is not. So, what we need to do is just kind of maneuver things around until the bolt goes through.

Now that we have the bolt through, we're going to go ahead and start the nut on there. We're not going to go any further than that though, because what we need to do next is we need to actually raise this up so it's pretty much at a ride level. So, I'll just kind of bring it up a couple inches here. And then, of course, we'll snug this up and we'll torque it to manufacturer's specifications, which is 81 foot-pounds. Let's lower this down and we can get the wheel back on. Wheel up on here. We'll start on the lug nuts. And then we'll torque them down to 100 foot-pounds. Let's torque these to 100 foot-pounds in a criss-cross manner. Torqued.