How to Replace Front Shock Absorber 1995-2005 Ford Explorer

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1AAuto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20+ years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this, to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to say you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video we're going to replace the rear shocks on this 98 Ford Explorer. This procedure is basically the same for any 95 to 2000 Explorer. You'll need penetrating oil, 13mm socket and ratchet, 15mm wrench, an adjustable wrench or vice grips.

The bottom of these front shocks are pretty easy, you can see them right here. These are 13mm bolts. I'm going to cheat a little bit and use my air ratchet. You can see here, right below the axle, I'm going to get a 13mm wrench right on there to hold them. In the wheel well you can see, here's the top of our shock. I've already sprayed it with a whole bunch of penetrating oil. What I'm using here is the 15mm wrench, put that on there first. This is just an adjustable wrench, it goes on the top shaft of the shock. Make sure it's nice and tight on there. If you're lucky, they come apart really easy like this. Sometimes you can start getting it apart and it will actually bind up and you'll have to cut it. This one looks like it's going to come apart pretty easy though. You might want to soak these overnight with penetrating oil so it will make it that much easier.

What I've run into here is the last bit of this is difficult and my wrench is not holding on. I'm going to use these vice grips and lock them on. Try and get this off the rest of the way. Okay, you can pull your shock down and out. Compare the old shock with the new shock. The important thing is they basically have the same length, which they do. You want to take, put a washer down and then you want to put this grommet on with the step side up. You can see here put the shock in from the bottom, pull it through, and you want your grommet with the step side down. There is a hole in the frame where those grommets kind of meet. Then you put your big washer on and then this bolt.

Basically, you're going to, just like on the other one, you're going to grab onto that and tighten that bolt up as far as it goes. Before you tighten that up to, it's important that you have the bottom angled so it's going to go into the control arm best. We'll hook the wrench on again. Underneath you can see, I've put a jack underneath the control arm and I'm going to lift it up, basically until you can see the shock come through. Connect the hardware to the shock. Go back to my impact wrench here. Hold on to the loose end with my regular wrench. Check those by hand, make sure they're really on. Good. Then we can let this down. We can do the other side and we're all set.

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