2003-07 Cadillac CTS with RPO Code FE1 (Soft Ride Suspension) without Automatic Leveling Suspension Front & Rear 4 Piece Complete Strut Assembly & Shock Absorber Kit TRQ SKA85009

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In this video, we're going to show you how to replace your front strut assembly in this 2005 Cadillac CTS.

Here are the items you'll need for this repair: 13mm, 18mm socket, ratchet, torque wrench, breaker bar, 18mm wrench, hammer, penetrating oil, jack and jack stands

Using your 19 millimeter socket and breaker bar, crack the lug nuts loose. Just about a turn is fine. You just want to make sure that there's no tension on them when you jack it up. Obviously you can't remove it with the weight of the vehicle on the tire. Once your lug nuts are loose, you can jack up the vehicle and secure it with jack stands.

You'll see on the rocker panel there's a small arrow. This indicates where the jack point is on the pinch weld under the vehicle. We'll place our jack under there, bringing the vehicle up until the wheel is off the ground and we have enough height to get a jack stand underneath the car. Directly in front of your jack, you'll notice this boxed frame like piece of the uni-body. That's the point we're going to use for our jack stand.

Slowly lower the vehicle onto the stand. Once the vehicle has been raised and supported, we'll finish removing the lug nuts. Remove the wheel from the hub. We're going to use a lift to make this easier to show you guys at home, but you should be able to do this in the driveway with a jack and jack stands.

Using an 18-millimeter socket and ratchet as well as an 18-millimeter wrench, remove the pinch bolt, and the upper ball joint on the upper control arm. Leave the nut. Flush with the end of the pinch bolt, so we can tap our pinch bolt out without damaging the threads. Tap the nut until the pinch bolt's out. Once you know that it's not in there tight, it's all right to give it a couple of light taps without the nut on there. Just be careful not to hit the threads or mushroom the end over.

Use your 18-millimeter wrench, as well as the socket and ratchet, behind the flange nut. We're going to put a little pressure with that 18-millimeter wrench and spin the bolt out. Remove these 2 13 millimeter bolts. Steel bolts inside of an aluminum control arm create corrosion because they are dissimilar metals, so be sure to soak these in penetrating oil if you have it available to you.

To release the upper portion of the strut, we'll have to remove these four 18 millimeter bolts as well as this 18-millimeter nut. This one here is going to require you to carefully release this A/C line and pull it out of the way. Be very careful not to chafe through, kink, or puncture this line, as it is high pressure. We're going to break all of our hardware loose with a breaker bar and an 18-millimeter socket. Once it's cracked loose, we'll move on to a ratchet. Before removing the last bolt, you want to reach into the wheel well and hold the shock assembly. Once that bolt's out, remove the strut and upper control arm from the vehicle.

Using an 18-millimeter socket and ratchet, as well as a wrench remove the bolts to the upper control arm. Move the upper control arm from the strut now.

Here we have our old part that we removed from our vehicle and our new part from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, these parts are identical. We have the same mounting locations for upper control arms, as well as to mount the upper mount into the body of the car. We have the same spring per a new strut tube, same mounts on the bottom, nice fresh bushing in here. What happens to these old struts is over the course of so many miles eventually these strut tubes fail and don't slow the bounce of the car as well as they were designed to. What this is actually meant to do is when your spring compresses and comes back up, say over a bump in the road, it's to control that so the car only goes up and down one time. If your strut's blown out, not only will you possibly get a clunking noise like our vehicle was making, but you will also notice the vehicle tends to bounce more when it hits bumps. This new strut is going to go in direct fit.

Reinstall the upper control arm. For now, we're only going to put the nuts on by hand, so it'll make it easier to install the control arm back into the spindle, as well as allowing us to put the weight of our vehicle onto the suspension before tightening the control arm, making sure we don't pre-load the bushings and cause them to fail prematurely.

Now our assembly is ready to go back into the vehicle. Reinstall the assembly into the vehicle. Support it with one hand while you line up the hardware. Be sure not to tighten down any bolts until you have all of them installed hand tight, to make them easier to line up. Once all the hardware has been installed hand tight, go ahead and tighten it down with your 18 millimeter socket and ratchet. Torque these bolts 83 foot-pounds. Once the bolts are torqued, clip that A/C line back into place.

We're using a large screwdriver here to pivot this bracket on the bottom of the strut, to make it easier to line up and install our bottom strap hold. Once the other side's almost down tight, install the opposite bolt. Torque these bottom bolts to 18 foot-pounds. Line up the upper control arm into the steering knuckle. Send the pinch bolt through. Start the nut. Bring it down with an 18 millimeter socket ratchet and wrench. Torque the pinch bolt to 44 foot-pounds.

While I'm using a screw jack, you can do this with a floor jack. We're lifting up on the bottom of the lower control arm to set the suspension to its normal ride height position to be able to tighten the top 2 bolts with the control arm bushings as not to pre-load them.

With the load of the suspension on the vehicle, tighten these bolts with an 18-millimeter socket ratchet and wrench. It may be easier to access these with two 18-millimeter wrenches.

Reinstall the wheel onto the hub. We're going to bring them down as tight as we can, while the tire's still in the air. We'll finish tightening them once the vehicle has been taken off the jack stands. Always be sure to tighten your lug nuts in a cross pattern. Jack our vehicle off the stands, with the weight of the vehicle back on the tire. If you don't have a torque wrench, get them as tight as you can by hand with a breaker bar. It takes a lot of force to break one of these lug studs, so you don't need to go crazy tight, but don't be afraid to put a little bit of your weight into them, to make sure they're tight. Of course, if you do have a torque wrench available to you, you'll want to torque your lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds. You can see with the breaker bar we actually got it pretty close.

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