With this car having recently becoming my daily driver (rather than my wife's) I have been going through various repairs and maintenance that have been put off for quite some time. (She never wanted to spend the money to fix it, but if I am going to drive a car I want it to be in good mechanical condition.)
1989 Camry LE 4-Cyl 3SFE
Since 1999 I had never changed the front struts and I did replace the rear struts almost 10 years ago, though by now I really don't remember many details of it.
I knew I had several rattles or squeaks coming from the back, and I also had several coming from the front. I planned to replace:
All 4 Struts
All 4 Strut Mounts
Add strut boots
and along the way also replaced
Rear sway bar (stabilizer bar) links
Front sway bar / control arm bushing on one side
Starting with the rear, here is how things were looking.
To access the top of the strut mount, I removed the bottom portion of the back seat and folded down the seat back. I removed the bolt at the bottom that holds the edge piece of the back seat so that I could peel back some trim pieces and lift up part of the back deck.
Here is a closer look. There was a piece of metal that also had to come off to expose this.
I was not interested in disconnecting the brake lines and having to bleed them. I slowly and patiently used a Dremel tool with a cutting disc and then bent the metal away so I could remove the brake line. The new struts were not fully enclosed here so I was able to just slide in the brake line.
This link attaches the strut to the rear stabilizer / sway bar. This nut was tight as hell and I was either going to break the allen wrench or round out the hole inside the stud. As I recall, this is an original part (plastic) and there is no hex to grab on the back side. It turned out that a loose link was a source of one of the rattles. The stud was rattling around inside the wallowed hole of the strut.
After messing around with it for a while, I just cut the strut in order to deal with the link later.
An overview of the old and new parts. (The new strut pictured here is actually for the other side, that is why it does not match the old one.) I mail ordered (cheap) the strut mounts and boots.
Eventually it was clear that I wasn't going to remove the link in one piece, so I went to work with the side grinder.
The ball is cut off, now I can try to carefully shave this down until I can push it out. I would have preferred to grind on the nut but I wasn't able to get a safe and sufficient angle to do so.
The piece conveniently spun around as I ground on it.
I ground into the sway bar a little more than I wanted to, but it was still pretty minor. It was at this point I had to go to the store and buy sway bar links.
Getting things back together.
By the end of this I had concluded that strut links are stupid. Their existence contributed to this project taking all day instead of several hours.
The new strut mount is in place. Consideration was required to make sure that the mount was aligned properly on the strut before tightening down the center nut. This mount does not swivel like the front mount does.
Onto the front end. It turns out that these are original from the manufacture of the car. 1989 to 2010 = 21 years and 199,100 miles. (Technically it was manufactured in 1988.) The bumper piece at the top of the shaft was half rotted away.
It would have been nice to buy new rubber pieces that fit between the spring and metal.
One side is back together. It was pretty quick to do and I credit a lot of this to the slotted hole for the brake line and the fact that it is EASY to reach the mount bolts. Really it's just 5 bolts. I had already replaced a bushing on this side a few weeks back when I also replaced that bearing.
This side was more involved only because I needed to replace the sway bar bushing. With some auto parts databases this part is hard to find. One store listed it as a stabilizer bar bushing but others called it a control arm bushing. Of course the sway bar has more than one bushing and when you ask for a sway bar bushing people assume you mean the half round grommet nearer to the front of the car. If you ask for a control arm bushing people assume you are talking about the inner bushing at the pivot point. I had to be pretty explicit and assertive to make sure I was getting pricing on the correct part. One person kept on and kept on trying to tell me I was talking about sway bar links. No! On the front, the bar goes directly through the control arm.
If I were doing this again, I would strongly consider ordering a whole new control arm because one can be found for about 3x the price I paid for the one bushing and a new one may come with both bushings and a new ball joint (if you select the right one.) It would be less work too because one would not have to drive out the old bushing which tends to be stuck tighter than Dick's hatband.
Also, pay no attention to how tightly stretched is the brake line. Better to avoid doing that. (The assembly is actually resting on the floor, not hanging by the line.)
This is the worn out, wallowed out bushing. On the floor is the center piece that fell out with the sway bar.
For reference, this is how the bushing should look.
It took some work to get this out. I used a flat screwdriver and a hammer. I pushed outward from the inside edge of the bushing (they don't touch each other on the inside) and also put some hits on the outer flanges to help separate the outer race from the arm assembly.
This is halfway done. One side is out, now hitting the other. I put a few nicks into the arm by doing this. I could have avoided that by slipping in a hacksaw blade and cutting the outer race until I reached the arm. Then, hammer the race toward the inside of the circle until it curls up and you can pull it out. I used that method on the first one.
This is a quick and dirty "polishing" of the surfaces. Nothing moves here so I wasn't concerned about making the surface shiny and smooth. I wanted to remove any burrs. I pounded in the new pieces with a dead blow rubber hammer.
My costs on this project are:
$134.68 for mounts and boots
$205.40 for struts
$35.30 bushings on one side
$53.48 sway bar links
For a total of $428.86
I might have been able to shave $60 off of that by mail ordering more components, but I wanted to have it done in time to drive to work and I am not able to predict each and every part I will need.
The car is much quieter running now and a lot tighter feeling. The front left strut mount had a bad bearing and this permitted rattling. The front right stabilizer bar bushing was wallowed out and this allowed the bar to rattle around inside the arm during bumpy terrain. The rear left sway bar link was loose in the strut and was rattling. I couldn't find the source by inspection because the bar was held tight by the other side. Only during bumps would the rattle occur - and it was loud and annoying!
Prior to this job, I had replaced the front right side outer tie rod end and the front left side wheel bearing. I suspect those were also noise sources and they were certainly noticeable at the steering wheel.
It is practically a different car now.
Linear Mode
