How to Replace Thermostat 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 thermostat. It's going to be a very 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.

Okay. I'm going to remove both these skid plates using my 12 millimeter, you can use a ratchet, you can use an air gun. Whenever you have access to you. Obviously, air gun's a little bit quicker. There's four bolts, so I got three of them. I'm going to have one left here, so that means the skid plate's going to be ready to come down, so I'm going to get ready to hold that as soon as I get this on.

Here they are. Grab the skid plate. Get that out of the way. We'll set it aside.

We'll do the forward skid plate now. There should be four bolts in this as well. One here, one there. One should be there, it's imaginary. One there also, imaginary. On the front of this, it has little hooks that go into the frame, right here. There's one. Then the other one's right here.

What you would do is you would start with the forward ones, take those out, and then you work your way to these. Once you remove these, the skid plate can come down this way towards you, or towards the front. You want to be careful for your face, but the hooks are going to make it so it can't completely fall straight down.

Okay, bring it down and slide it out towards the front of the vehicle. Should want to slide right out here. Just get this hook off of there. There it is.

Here's the hooks I was talking about. They just go right up inside here.

Okay, now that we've removed the skid plate, we can access the petcock, which is right here. This is the drain for your cooling system. You want to of course make sure you drain it into a proper recycling receptacle, so you can dispose of it properly. Wear your safety glasses and your hand protection.

Just going to go ahead and turn that to the left until fluid starts coming out. There we are. All right. We'll let that completely drain out, and then we can continue with our service from the top.

Okay, now that we've got that draining, I'm just going to open up this radiator cap right here. We'll take a look at it. This one looks like it's original. It's been on there for a while. I'm going to go ahead and replace this. I'll set this aside for now though.

Now I'm going to remove the cover right here. I'm going to use a 10 millimeter. Set those aside. Lift this up, pull it towards you, slides right off. We'll set this aside.

Okay, now that we've got the coolant down low enough, right here's the thermostat housing. We're going to remove this clamp right here. You just squeeze it, slide it down the hose a little bit, and then we're going to remove the hose. After that, we'll remove these nuts, and we'll be able to slide that out of the way.

I'm just going to use something as simple as pliers. Grab onto the clamp, slide it down the hose, like I said. There we are. You can see the markings where the clamp was. When we go to put the clamp back on, you want to try to line it back up with where you got it.

Now, you can carefully, if you've got these types of pliers, you can carefully try to shake the hose around a little bit. We just want to break it free from the thermostat housing. It's been on there for quite a while. It's happy there, but it's time for it to move for a couple of minutes.

Okay. When we remove this, there might still be some coolant, so you want to make sure you're wearing hand protection. Keep your mouth closed just in case. Nice. We'll move that lower hose. We've got a clear view of our thermostat housing. We're going to remove that, that and the third one down there. I'm going to grab my 10 millimeter. We'll move along.

Okay. We're going to go for this top one right here to start. 10 millimeter. There we are. That's what our nut looks like. We'll do the other two and we'll move along. I'm going to get this last nut off of here. Here we are.

Okay. This is going to be ready to come off now. There may be coolant up in between here, so once again, make sure you're wearing your hand protection and keep your mouth closed just in case. Little bit of coolant. Goin' into into the collection bucket, there's our thermostat housing. Easy peasy.

Okay. We've got the old thermostat housing off. This right here is your old gasket. You need to make sure that you take that off of there. That's what it looks like. Your new thermostat housing comes with a new gasket, so you want to make sure you take off the old one. Otherwise, you double gasket it. That's going to be an issue.

Okay, now, we want to make sure we clean off the base plate where the gasket's going to ride on. I'm just going to use a nice clean rag for that. If you notice that there's a lot of crusties or crunchies in there, something that's going to cause an issue, you could you just something as simple as a razor blade to clean it off. That one actually looks really good, so I'm not going to have to worry about that.

Okay. We'll take our new thermostat housing with gasket and thermostat installed. You're going to face this so it's angling down. You don't want it facing up. Obviously, it would be an issue. I probably don't have to say that, but just throw it in there just in case. People have been known to try to put it on the wrong way. Just going to start all three of these nuts. Then we'll bottom them out. Then we're going to torque them down to 80 inch pounds, not foot pounds, inch pounds. That's not very much.

Okay. We're going to torque these up, 80 inch pounds. I'm going to take that little universal off of there. The less doodads and gadgets you have on these things when you're trying to torque, the better. If you can avoid it. Just try one more time. There we are. Okay. Nice. Go ahead one more time here, try to. It's hard with all these. The universal and the extension on there really doesn't want me to do it. Here we go. tight, tight, tight. Let's move along to the next step.

We're going to grab our hose, put it on the housing. Here we are, bottomed out right up against the end there. You got a little rise, there's one on the backside, so you just push it right up against.

Okay. You can see the markings on the hose. Like I said before, you want to try to align the clamp up exactly where you got it from. Yep. Perfect. We can move on to the next step.

Okay. It's time to install our engine cover. We've got two little hookiedoos like this. One's going to go here, one's going to go there. This is going to set flat down, and then we've got a little piton there. One there, going to go in there. Line them up, bring it down, line up the studs with the holes.

We've got two nuts. Tight. Looking good.

Okay. It's time to get this skid plate back up. We've got a little hook right there, that's going to go right in this hole right here. What that's going to do, is make it so, if you had to, you could let go, and/or, you can hold towards the front and you don't have to worry about holding up the whole weight of the skid plate. I'm just going to take my bolts for the forward end of it, get it started in the hole there. I'm not going to tighten it down until I get all four started.

All right, nice and easy here. Come around. See if I can see up there. This one. Perfect. Let's move ahead.

All right. We've got our forward skid plate. We've got our little hooks on the skid plate. They go right up inside the slots. You got two hooks, you got two slots. Just bring it so it's straight up and down, line the hooks up with the slots. Now, at this point, you can release the front, assuming you have both hooks there, and you can move along to the back, where we can get this in and situated.

All right. Should be wanting to go up in there. There we go. That one's started. There we go. Just going to blast them up in there. Theoretically, most of these skid plates have four. You'll have two up here too. If you had those two up there, you're going to want to make sure you start those before you tighten these.

There we go, tight. Tight. Very nice.

Okay, friends. I just want to show you this real quick. Something you can buy right at 1AAuto.com. It's a little spill-proof funnel. This is really great, because it's got pretty much every accessory that you might need inside of it. It doesn't matter what kind of vehicle you're working on, more than likely we have an adapter for it right in there.

For the Toyotas, it's green, right there. You can you grab the small cap, goes right on like this. Then of course, we got all these adapters, like I said. If you ended up needing any of those for a different type of a vehicle, you can of course use something like that.

Got our funnel. You're going to want to make sure you have access to this. This is the little plunger or plugger. Now what we'd want to do, we're just going to put some coolant in this. This is universal coolant. It's not green coolant, just so you know, it looks a little green, but it's not. Open up our little plunger here. It's going to burp out any air that's in there. We're going to add a little bit more as soon as this is done here.

All right. Now we're going to get all of our extra pieces out of the way here. Take this, just set it, whatever. Wherever you want to put it, really, so it's not going to fall. Now we're going to start up the vehicle, let it run for a few minutes. It's going to help burp out any air that's in there, and as the air comes up, the coolant's going to continue down. Once that's done, had it running for a little while, we're going to make sure that the cooling fans turn on. Once those turn on, it should be fully burped out, and at that point, we'll be able to move ahead to the next step.

Okay. This has been running for a while now. We turned it off. Let it sit for a minute. Now, I'm just going to grab the hose. It's going to be a little warm. Going to make it quick. There we are. I pushed the plunger down in, that's going to make it so I can lift up on this funnel, and I'm just going to put the excess right inside this overflow. After we put that in the overflow, we'll top off the overflow to where it needs to be, and then we should be all set to move along.

There's that. Going to grab a little bit more coolant for in there. Before we do that, it's warm. Get this off of here. There we are. All right, I'm just going to grab some more coolant to top this off. We'll be all set to move ahead.

All right, fill this up to our level there. There we are, just below the full line. I like to have it right in between the full and the low. That way there, when the coolant expands or contracts, it has space to go.

There we are. We'll just grab our radiator cap, put this back in here. Nice.

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