How to Replace Rear Shocks 2008-12 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.

Once you have the wheel off, it's important to remember that we're actually going to want to try to raise this up a little bit. We want to take the pressure off of your shock so it's not fully extended. If you were to try to take out this bolt right now, once you finally got it to almost the end, the suspension is going to want to drop and you might damage the threads inside of your knuckle. And now, we're gonna remove this bolt right here using a 21-millimeter socket. Next, we need to remove our two upper mounting nuts. Just remember when you remove these, there's going to be nothing holding your shock up. So, after you remove one, make sure you have full grasp on it. Go ahead and remove this from the vehicle. Next, we're going to remove this upper nut to get off the upper mounting from the shock. Every time I get shocks, I always like to charge them up before I install them. What I mean by that is to go ahead and press this down as far as it can go, let it completely come all the way up, and then repeat the process three to five times. Let's take our new shock. Take the nut off of there, and we'll remove both of these. Now, let's get our pieces on. We're going to put it just like this. Now, let's grab this piece, slide that right over. Put this facing in like that. And this right here. All right. Let's tighten this. Perfect.

Let's get ready for our install. You'll notice if you put this on backwards because the shock won't be at the right angle. Put on both those nuts, if you want to use a little thread locker, we'll call it your prerogative. We'll snug these up. Torque them to 18 foot-pounds. All right. Let's get our shock lined up here. Take your bolt, slide it through. Take your washer. Make sure you don't forget to put that in there. It's easy to forget. That on there. Okay. Now you might need to lift up or down on the shock to try to get it to line up. Now, let's torque this to 133 foot-pounds. Get our jack out of here. 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.