How to Replace Gas Tank Straps 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today. I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser, and I'm going to be replacing the fuel tank straps. It's going to be a fairly easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

What we're going to want to do, now that we've got the vehicle raised and supported safely, we're going to want to take down this shield right here. You've got a nut here, a nut there, and then if you can them, there's going to be a nut there and a nut there. What we're going to do, we're going to support this. You might not need to if your straps are good. You shouldn't have this strap right here. This is just, I don't know, somebody put that on there for some reason and we're going to replace it. I'm going to cut this right off of here. I'm not planning on reusing this. I don't think that it's going to be of much use, so we'll cut this off. I'm just going to grab some cutters, and now that we've got this supported so the tank can't go anywhere, and we'll get this out of the way.

My cutters, my safety glasses in case this thing goes awry. I'm just going to go ahead and cut through this. There we are. Let's get this out of the way. This side... maybe I'll grab this side down after I get the tank down a little bit. Not worried about it. Set this aside, recycle it, dispose of it properly. Now, we've got a clear view of the rest of our nuts here, or what should be. Hopefully we can get that off. We're going to use our 12mm socket, goes right onto these nuts here. That's what it looks like. Set that aside.

Just give it a couple of loving bonks. There we are. Our shield can move around at this point, so we want to be careful. We have a ground strap up here. I'm going to take the nut that I took off there, I'm just going to put it on a couple of threads. There we are. Not too much, just so this can't fall down. I'm going to come up here with my 10mm socket and I'm going to remove that nut from the ground strap. Seems like a strange thing to have a ground strap attached to this. It might also be just a trap for in case the plastic breaks here and this comes down, it'll be able to be caught. That's my guess. There we are. I'm going to go ahead and try to remove the other nut there. There we are. Take down this bracket. Here's our two nuts. Nothing special about them, 10mm. We'll set those aside. We can move along.

I'm going to go for this one using my 12mm. Just tap it on. Safety glasses are super important whenever you're working underneath the vehicle. You don't want to get any debris in your eyes. We're going to remove this. That one is not coming off. Moving ahead, do this one. Same thing, 12mm. Give it a couple of loving bonks, get it on there. There we are. I'm just going to start it back on the threads here. There we are. Get my 12 off of there. There we are. I'm going to grab a twist socket so I can remove this nut.

For our stripped nut, I'm going to use something like this. It's called a twisty socket or a stripped nut removal socket. It's nice to go one size down if you can, so this was a 12, you want to use a 12 use a 12. If you can somehow get a 7/16 or a 11 on there, you can go with that. I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks here, get it up on there. I've already sprayed it down with the penetrant, so we don't have to worry about that, and it's a plastic gas tank, so I'm not going to use any heat. I'm going to try again.

There we are. Get that off of there, as simple as doing this. Just get it to start on there, hopefully. Boy, that's how rusted it is. It doesn't want to go on. I got it. Now, I'm just going to give it a couple of bonks, and theoretically it should come off, but it's not going to right now. Now, I'm just going to lower this down. The strap on this one obviously is broken. That's why we're doing this. The whole gas tank is kind of coming down a little bit, so I want to make sure that as I go down, I'm not putting any tugs on anything. This is going pretty decent at this point. Essentially, all I need to do, though, is just bring it down to the point where I can grab the gas tank, lift up the tank, and then hopefully slide this shield out of the way. At this point, I'm going to remove the rest of these nuts.

There we are. We'll get this shield out of the way. Let's see. I'm going to take a peek, see what my options are here. Ooh, very dirty. Let's put that there for now. I'm just going to put this back here real quick. The less time it's hanging the better. There we go. Very nice. Analyze our situation. Here we go. We're going to do the rear straps, since this is the one that's broken on this particular vehicle. We're going to do these straps one at a time. I've got my jack stand holding up the tank for me. I'm just going to go ahead and give this a couple of bonks, get it up on there, 14mm socket. There we are. I'm just going to take this off of here.

It's very tight. I'm going to grab something a little different. Something a little different here. Still sticking with our 14, 1/2-in. gun, safety glasses of course. It's starting to come loose. I'm just going to spray it with a little bit more penetrant. We go in with it. Now, it comes out nice and easy.

Here we are. That's what our bolt looks like. Now, we're going to take off this clip right here. It's kind of like a Cotter Pin. It goes through the hole that's in this pin right here, but it has a little hooky do that goes around the back side and kind of holds on. I'll show you what it looks like in one second here. Get that out of here. It went through the pin, and then this hook came around the back side and locked it in. It's pretty dirty. I'll just clean it off real quick. There we are. Set that aside. Wiggle this around. I'm going to grab my pin. Just going to give it a couple of bonks, see if I can help work it out of here.

Pin is coming out. It's stuck in there pretty good. There we are. Get our pin down. There's our pin with the whole. I'm going to go ahead and clean this up before we reinstall it. Big difference. Keep going. Now what we're going to do, we have our old strap. We're just going to take off this little plastic coating, rubber, whatever it is. There we are. I'm going to put this on my new one. Start at one side. Just work it on there. Whatever you got to do to get it to go on. Just put it all on one side here. Essentially, just work it all the way around.

I'm going to get this strap up here. Put the pin through from the rear of the vehicle to the front, just like that, and grab my little clip that I showed you earlier. Put it through the hole. Give it a little tug, can't fall off. Pin can't go anywhere. Perfect. Let's go to the next step.

If you look, you can see the threads on the old bolt. They're pretty much gone all along the top there, so if you have access to it, you just want to replace it, 10 X 1.25. We're going to use this new bolt and we're going to go ahead and get that strap in. I'm just going to get this up on here, line it up the best I can with my hole. There we are. Here we are.

It's bottomed out. Tight. We can move ahead.

Let's get this down and out of here. We'll bring it up to the front. We can do the front strap. The front strap is going to be the exact same as the rear. Well, I guess not really the exact same because I don't have to cut the ratchet strap or anything, but you're going to take out the bolt here, you're going to take out the pin over there. I'm going to go ahead and use my 14mm socket again. I'm going to see if I can clear off some of this rust coming around here. Get it all to break up so hopefully I can get the socket on there.

I can see quite a bit of that bolt now. Cool. Use a little bit of penetrant. There we are. Use my air gun here. Going with my 14. It's coming down.

There we are. We've got our old bolt. Looks a little better than the first, but I would still replace it. We'll set that aside. Move ahead to the next step.

Same as the rear. We've got our little clip that goes on the end of that pin, so I'm just going to see if I can get it off of here. It seems a little harder to get to because of the angle of the tank. It's kind of playing defense on me here. Here it is. We'll set that aside. We'll see if we can get that pin to move. The pin is moving. I'm just going to slide it through just as far as we can, or as far as we need to to be able to get this off. There we are. Take the pin right out. There we go. I've got my pin. I'm going to clean that up and we'll replace this strap.

We're going to get this up here, so I'll hold my clip, grab my pin. I cleaned the pin, by the way. Looks good. Good job, Len. Thank you. Just get this up in here. Cool. Got our clip. See if I can get my hand up in there one direction or the other. There we are. We'll grab our rubber thing. We'll put that on there. Let's get this rubber on here. I'm going all the way down along one side, and now I'll bring it over to get it on there. Cool.

That's all on there. Very nice. I'm going to grab my other new bolt, bring it over. Line it up with my hole. I'm just going to tighten this up. Cool beans. Let's move to the next step.

We've got our shield, our little connector up here. I'm going to try to use this jack as a support so I can get some work done here. What I'm going to do, get it semi-lined up just like that. Now, we can come over here, try to get the rear lined up. I grabbed a couple of new nuts here. I grabbed some washers. Just get that so it's on there. Can't go anywhere. This one, same thing. Cool beans. We can move ahead to the front.

Now, we're just going to try to flex the shield far enough that we can get the studs to come through the holes, which by my calculations is impossible. Cool. While we've got it up, I'm just going to start one of these on here. Shield can't go anywhere now. Get this up on here. Cool beans. Let's move along to the next step, get this out of here.

Got our cable on there. We're going to put this up on there. We've got our two little nuts. One started, grab this one. See if I can up on there. Cool. Now that we have everything started, let's start tightening it all up. 10mm. Tight, tight. 12mm, 12, 12, 12, 12. There we are.

Tight, tight, tight, tight. Booyah. Let's clean up our mess.

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