How to Change Flat Tire 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on our 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser. I want to show you how to fix a flat tire, or at least change it over to your spare tire to get you off the road so you can be safe. It's going to be fairly simple. I want to be the one that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so we just pulled off the road as far as we can get. Maybe we're in a parking spot, or a parking lot, or on the side of the road, but we're as far away from traffic as we can get. This is super important. You want to make sure you're safe. Okay? Next, what we're going to do, make sure that your car is either in park, or if you have a manual, you're in second gear. Take your emergency brake, put on your emergency brake. Okay? That's going to help keep the vehicle from shifting and moving as we're continuing our work. Got our E brake on. We've got our hazard lights on. This is super important, let's people know. We're going to safely exit the vehicle, and we'll continue from there.

Okay, so here we go. Let's get into the trunk of our FJ. Even though we have the emergency brake on, it can't hurt to go ahead and block the wheels anyway. You can use whatever you've got, wood, or even some nice chock blocks if you have those. Those would be helpful. All right. we've blocked the wheel. We're going to come right over here now, push down on this, this, here we go. We'll go ahead and get this out of here. Let's see what we got. Oh yeah. Toyota gave us everything we need to succeed here. Perfect. We've got our lug wrench and our jack tools. Right under here, here's our jack. Okay? To get that out, you just turn this to the left. It's going to loosen up the bottle jack of it, release pressure, and we can take it right out of there. The way this works, when you turn it to the left, it goes down. When you turn it to the right, it goes up. Basic. Close this up. We've got our wrench.

I'm just going to try to get our cover off of here. This can be very difficult. Getting it back on is even harder. Here we are. There's our spare tire. We're going to use our 21, or, I guess, our lug wrench, should be a 21 millimeter though, in case you're missing yours for some reason. There we are. So this is what your lug nuts are going to look like. Set that aside, and do the same to the other two. All right. Now, we're going to lift up our wheel, it might be fairly heavy. Of course, you want to make sure you watch out for your trailer hitch if you have one. Pull this out. Here we are. Let's wheel this up to the front of the vehicle. All right. We'll just wheel this right up here, someplace safe. There we go. It's nice and close to the front here. This is where we're going to be doing our work. Once we get our wheel off of here, we don't want to mess around. We want to go ahead and get this next wheel back up on here, and get ourselves on the road.

All right. Get our jack, this is approximately where we're going to put it, right up against your frame. It's a solid frame on this vehicle, so you can go right here. As you can tell, I've got quite a bit to go, so I'm just going to take it back out to a comfortable area, I'm just going to bring it up. Once I get it close, that's when we'll really get it set up and we'll start using some real tools here. Okay, here we go. Let's just make sure we're in a safe spot on our frame. I'm going to go right here. So I'm pretty close to here, I'm right in the center of that frame unit, not close to the edge in the front, or the edge in the rear, right directly in the center. The first time you go to use this, you're going to notice that bolt is through and you're like, "I can't loosen it." Right? Well, we've got the handle, and the handle has a little square on it, and the nut's a little square, or bolt. Just turn it, break it free. It also has a little Philips head in case you wanted to use that for some reason, but you've already got the tool here, just go with that. Take this, put it in there, snug this up. Cool. Nice and snug. We're in over here, just like that, loosen up this little finger wingnut. Okay.

So I've got this so it can't go anywhere. I'm not going to continue jacking yet. I'm going to come over here, I'm just going to loosen up all these lug nuts while the vehicle is still on the ground. The reason why I'm doing it while it's still on the ground is, just because as I'm going like this, the vehicle is going to be shaking, and rocking, and doing all sorts of crazy things, and I'd much rather everything to be on the ground. So I'm just going to grab it like that. Okay. If you don't have the grip strength for that, you can do something like this, just hit it like that. Then, carefully, press down. Whatever you need to do to get it loose. For me, I just go like that. I'm not taking any of these lug nuts off, I'm just loosening them at this point. Cool. They're all loose. Now, we can move ahead to jacking up the FJ.

Okay. All right, so here we go. The wheel's off the ground. I'm just going to go ahead and remove our lug nuts. These lug nuts look the same as the ones in the rear. If it came down to it and you ended up missing one in the front here, or on one of your main drive wheels, you can go ahead and grab one off your spare tire temporarily, until you could buy a new one. Same exact lug nuts. Okay, we're on our last lug nut. This wheel's going to be ready to break free. We want to be careful taking this off, not to shift the vehicle too much if possible. Okay. Of course, make sure that you're clear of the vehicle. If it seems like something starts going wrong, and it starts moving, whatever it's doing, just clear the vehicle. There's no way you're going to be able to hold this thing up. So let's get this out of the way. We'll grab our spare tire, wheel it right on over, put it up close to the vehicle. Okay.

I can see my lug studs through the back there. I just want to lift this up on here, just like that. There we are. Got our lug nut on there. Everything's covered in sand, dust, and stuff here. Just do the same to all these lug nuts, and then we'll snug them up. So now that we've got all of our lug nuts started, we're going to go ahead and snug these up, in a star/crisscross pattern. Okay? So I'm starting here, I'll go over here, here, here, here, here. I'm never going to go around in a circle when I'm doing this. The reason for that is because if you have your wheel kinked to the side and you start tightening just going around in a circle, it's going to tighten up on one side and be up on the other. Seems like it's fine, good to go, you drive down the road, get a little wobble. That little wobble turns into a big wobble once these lug nuts start falling off and your wheel comes loose. All right. So safety first. Oops, just throw that. Here we are.

Okay, we have them all snugged. Now, we're just going to lower the vehicle down so the wheel is touching the ground and it can't spin, and we'll snug them up. Put our hook back in our jack, stand back as far as we can here from the vehicle. Okay. Wheels on the ground. The wheels should be torqued to 85 foot pounds. Is this a torque wrench? Not so much. Do you have a torque wrench in the back of your truck? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. If you do, 85 foot pounds. If you don't, make sure they're tight. So go ahead and get on it. If you needed to, you don't feel strong, just step on it a little bit. Of course, be careful. You've got this right here. So if you go ahead and step and you slide off, that might hurt a lot. So please just be careful, use your best judgment. You do you, boo boo. Just be safe about it. Okay, I snugged them all. I'm just going to double check. I want to make sure driving down the road to get to the next service station, to get my tire fixed, I'm going to be safe. My family's safe, other people on the road are safe. Those are all definitely tight. Let's go ahead and get our jack out of here, and we'll get on down the road.

There we are. You can take all the time you want packing this up. All right. Then, go ahead and put it inside the trunk of your vehicle. All right. So we're back in the trunk. You can take time, like I said, packing up this jack. It's going to take a little while. If you're going to a service station and they're going to fix your tire for you, odds are they'll go ahead and mount it back on. If they're not, and you're going to have to reuse this jack, why go ahead and put it all the way back down, right? We'll just use our common sense. If we're just going to go someplace so we can try to jack it up, maybe plug the tire ourselves, just set it aside, put everything nice and safe so it can't go anywhere. All right. We'll grab our spare tire, we can put that right in here, or our flat tire, sorry. We'll put our flat tire right in here, and we can boogie on down the road to get to where we need to go safely, get our tire fixed, put the right tire back on, and get the spare tire back on.

Okay, so we got our tire fixed. Let's get our spare back up on the back here. We notice that the two studs go this way. Then, this one's like this, so it's a downward triangle. So when we're lifting this up, we want to try to make sure that we get it so we get it lined up here. I'm just going to put it up on to the trailer hitch, because I have one. I've got two holes here, one down in the center. I'm holding it with my leg and not really my arms, just slide it in, hold on to it. Grab our three lug nuts here. The way that these lug nuts are, they have a shank that goes into the wheel. If you have the shank hitting up against the edge of the wheel hole there, it might seem like it's tightening on, but really it's just grabbing on to the lip there. So you might just have to wiggle the wheel around a little bit. Like that one, that one's going on the lip. Just shift the wheel around. There we are. Nice. Let's snug it down. Want to make sure that these are nice and snug. You don't want them loosening up as you're driving down the road. Nice and tight.

All right, let's get this back on. It's going to go over the top first, try to slide it down as much as possible. There we are. Nice. All right. Back on the road again. So now it's time to get our jack put back. We're going to put this end facing out, this is going to slide under here and sit right up inside this groove. Slide it in, try to get it right inside our black groove there. Once you get it in just go ahead and turn this to the right, which is jacking up the jack. It'll apply pressure inside there, so we're just snugging this up. We don't want to make it too tight, in case the next person maybe isn't as strong as you. So just as long as the jack can't move around in there you're doing all right. That's good. We've got our band. This is going to come around our toolkit, clip into here. Take my toolkit, put it up in there, put my band right around, get this string around there, and there we go. Cool. All right. We've got our cover. Okay. It goes with these facing down. Give them a little bonk. Bonk, bonk. It's my thing. All right.

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