How to Replace Rear Struts 2011-17 Toyota Camry

Hi. I'm Mike from 1A Auto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years.

Hi, everyone. Sue here from 1A Auto, and today, on our 2013 Camry we have in the shop, I'm going to show you how to remove and replace the rear strut assemblies. If you need this part or any other part for your car, click on the link below and head on over to 1AAuto.com.

21mm socket, and this car came with aftermarket extended lug nuts. Your car's not going to have these extensions on them unless you have that style. But it's 21mm socket, and I'm going to loosen them up with the weight of the vehicle on the tire. I'm going to use a two-post lift to raise my car. You can use jack and jack stands at home. Now it's up in the air, I can take the lug nuts off by hand, and take the wheel down.

Disconnect the rear sway bar link to the strut assembly. There's a Allen head here in the center that stops the spindle part of the sway bar link from spinning, and it happens to be a 5mm. So, 14mm nut, I'm going to put a 14mm wrench on there, and then I'm going to take my Allen head socket and put it in there. Now, I pre-sprayed everything because it is rusty from the road. I put my ratchet on there, and just break that free.

Now, if you are replacing your sway bar links at the same time, you would disconnect it from the bottom here. You can leave it attached to the strut because you're going to take it and throw it out with the strut. But we are not replacing our sway bar links, so that's why I'm going to be leaving this attached. Okay. I'm going to put a ratchet wrench on there to make it go a little bit smoother. Take that off by hand. Grab that link and slide it right out of that bracket. If not, we're going to--let me see. I'm going to take a rubber mallet and see if I can punch this sway bar link out of the bracket. I'm going to be reusing it, so that's why I don't want to use a metal hammer. I don't want to peen over the threads. Nope, that didn't work. There we go.

Now we have the brake flex hose that's attached here and the ABS wire that's attached. The ABS wire happens to be a 10mm socket for that bolt. You can see the bracket. And then the flex hose bracket is a 12mm socket.

Now I'm going to undo the lower strut bolts. There's two of them. Two nuts, and the bolts go through from the back side. They're 22mm, so I'm going to put the 22mm wrench on the bolt head, and I'm going to put the socket on the actual nut side. I put an extension on there so I can use my breaker ratchet and break that bolt free. Now I'm going to break free the top one. You can see that these are still original, and the reason why the nut was so tight, the bolts have a lot of thread lock on there. It shouldn't be oxidized. Wow. Yeah, that's locker.

Now I'm going to take a rubber mallet, and I'm going to hit the bolts through. If you grab it and push the strut back and forth, you can pull the bolt right out. No doubt we'll clean that up before we reinstall that. Grab the bottom bolt.

When it comes to doing the back struts, the top part of it, it is located behind these side pillars of the seat, so we have to start by removing the bottom part of the seat. How you do that is, on this Toyota, you reach both hands straight down underneath and give it a good pull up. You can see the actual clips right here. They're just like little finger clips that lock them in, and that little pin slides right in and locks there, and then there's hooks in the back that hook up underneath.

Now, the side pillar comes out by this mounting. There's two bolts down here. This is an airbag wire harness. Whenever you see a yellow harness in cars, it's usually SRS, the airbag system. You really don't ever disconnect one. You have to disconnect the battery and wait so many minutes to disconnect one. In this case, if you're paying attention to what you're doing, you can just simply undo this bolt, and don't pull on that harness. It really comes right out of your way. It's a 12mm socket for this bolt. 12mm socket, take the second bolt out.

Now, up here I'm going to take the seat belt out. They have this little cutout in the slot in the guide for that, so you just pull that seat belt up and slide it out. What I like to do sometimes is I'll grab this whole thing, I'll pull down on the handle, and then I'll just wrap it up enough so that when I pull up, it stays up there. Now it's out of my way.

Before you pull that side pillar up, you have to release the back seat down. You open the trunk and pull on that lever for that side, it releases the seat, and then you just pull the seat down. Now, with the seat down, you can grab the pillar from this bottom and the top, guide it up, and there you go. Now, watch out for that airbag wire. You don't want to twist it or anything. Just rest it right down there.

Now you can see your three top mounting nuts for that strut. 12mm socket. Once you break it free, so the shallow 12mm socket just fits with the top of the stud coming through the bolt. That'll be good enough to loosen it. I'm going to take two of them completely out and leave the last one in. I'm going to leave this easy access one in. Actually, snug it back up. I'm going to break the back one loose.

Now I make sure that everything's out of my way--brake line, ABS wire, then I'm going to loosen up that top, last nut. Now it's just finger-tight, and I can reach in here, grab this strut assembly, and my left hand is taking that off the stock. There you have it.

Here we have our new rear strut for our 2013 Camry from 1A Auto. Complete assembly, comes with a nice bottom rubber seal. Of course, it comes with a strut cap. It comes with new locking nuts for the top, welded nuts on the bracket for the flex hose and the ABS wire, the hole for the sway bar link, and the mounting bracket. This is the factory one, identical in height, shape, and design. If you need this part or any other part for your car, click on the link below and head on over to 1AAuto.com.

Remove the actual nuts that come on from the shipping. They thread them right on there, so we got to move those. I'm going to put them inside because I'm going to have to use that. Now I'm going to get down here and I'm going to line up the three mounting bolts through the strut tower hole. Now I can reach down below, and I can pull the strut up. Now with that aligned with the three holes, the studs up and then push it up. Hand-start the three nuts.

The new nuts are a 13mm socket. The old ones were 12. There we go. Now I'll get the new socket. Now, with your socket and ratchet, just start bringing them up. I'm just going to do equal pressure all the way around until they bottom out. Because they're locking nuts that you can only go down so far by hand before they start to tighten up, so we have to go quite aways with the ratchet. Now we put the nuts all the way in the mount. In the torque specs, it's 29 foot-pounds.

This is the plastic hook piece, and it lines right up with that. It's got a little pocket right there. Make sure all your wires are still connected, nothing came undone, and we're just going to line it right up in the back here and then push down. Then you can look down here and see if your bolts line up. The bolt holes line up perfectly. They're all the way down. You can start your two bolts, and that's still a 12mm socket. Just snug them right down. Then we take the seat belt. I'm going to line it right up. See the slot right there and how it swoops down? I'm going to put the belt in this way, go all the way down, and it will straighten itself right out. Put your back seat back up.

Now we can install the bottom seat. The little secret here, obviously, it's pretty easy. It's not hard at all. You got to aim it down this way. Now come into the car. I grab my seat belts, make sure they're facing the proper way. With my knees, I just bring the seat right down, and then you just pop it down. Hear it click? You're done.

Now, with our strut mount up there installed, I can move the knuckle around, line up the bottom part, and alls I got to do is just grab it pull that straight up. Just get your mounting bolts. So, I can get the lower strut bolt back in easily. I'm going to remove the caliper bracket bolts. There's a top and a bottom one. I'm just going to take the top one completely out and loosen the bottom one, and that's a 17mm socket, and that way I can pivot the caliper back so I can get that bold in and out easily.

I took the top caliper bracket bolt out so I can move the caliper back a little bit. I like to put things back the way the factory set them, and they put the actual bolts this way. Yeah, it would have been easier to turn the bolt around the other way. Having a heck of a time here. Okay.
Now I'm going to put a little bit of thread lock on the actual bolts. I waited to put them all the way through before I did that. I'm just going to use the mid-range blue. Just a dab is all you need. I just like to pack it into the threads. Then we'll start the actual nut. I'm going to put the sway bar link, line it up and put that nut on too, so I can torque everything down at the same time.

I'm going to mount the ABS bracket. Reuse the old bolt. That's a 10mm socket. Line up my flex hose. They like to make it difficult for you. That's a 12mm now, socket. Change it up, make sure you're staying awake. Just snug it.

All right, now we're going to torque that lower strut bolts. I got everything out of the way, secured so I don't have to worry about anything slipping and cutting a wire. 22mm socket and wrench, and I'm going to snug these right down as tight as I can go because the torque specs is 214 foot-pounds. I'm going to tighten up the bottom one. Really snug it down. 214 foot-pounds and here we go. Oh, I did it. Hear that? Pleased to have a cheeseburger every once in a while. Now we're going to do the lower.

Now I'm going to do the rear sway bar link. 14mm socket and ratchet wrench, and then the Allen head, which is a 5mm Allen head. Put that right in the center. Snug it down. I want to torque this at 25 foot-pounds.

Now, if you loosened the caliper like I did, we're going to put the caliper bolt to the knuckle back in, bracket to knuckle. That's a 17mm socket. Now I'm going to torque the bracket back to its specs. It's 58 foot-pounds. And then the bottom one, and there we go.

Now I can mount my tire on. Just put a couple of the lug nuts on. Grab the rest. Hand-tighten them up before you lower the vehicle. I'm going to lower my vehicle. Just put a little bit of weight on the tire, enough to torque it. 21mm socket, and I'm going to torque my wheel lug nuts in a star pattern, and the wheel torque is 76 foot-pounds. One more time.

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