2020 Ram 1500 Classic 4 Wheel Drive without Air Suspension Front Driver & Passenger Side 2 Piece Strut & Spring Assembly Set TRQ SCA57058

Hey friends, it's Len at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on 2016 Ram 1500. We're going to be replacing front struts. 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.

We've got our vehicle set up on all the lift points. We got the majority of the weight off of the wheel. It's still on the ground, just barely. We want to make sure that it can't spin while we're trying to remove the lug nuts. All I'm going to do is, I'm going to break them free. Once they come a little loose, I'm just going to move along. We don't want to unscrew them very far to the point that the wheel can tilt, and or put more pressure on the wheel studs. We don't want to break any of those.

Now we've got it to this point, we loosened all five, we can bring up the vehicle, remove all five lug nuts, take the wheel off. Here we go. I'm going to continue using my 22 millimeter socket, can use the ratchet to break it free if it's still a little tight. We're just going to remove the lug nuts. What I like to do is, I'll get one fully unscrewed here, the first one. Once it's all the way off, take a look. It looks okay. I'm just going to go ahead and put it on a couple threads, and then I'll go ahead and remove the other four. The reason why I put this on a couple threads is so when I remove these, the wheel can't come off and hurt me.

I've got the other four lug nuts off. Now I'm going to hold the wheel stable as much as I can, so it doesn't come falling off and hurt me. Remove my last lug nut. I'm going to set it aside. Grasp the wheel firmly. I can hold my leg underneath it, support the weight if I want, so I'm not using my back. I can hold this all day if I wanted to. Put it down, roll it out of the way. Now, we're all set to move onto our next step.

We have our three studs, two, three, right there. All I'm going to do is I'm going to break all these free. I'm going start with this one, I'll bring it all the way up to the top, but then I'm going to leave it on a few threads, and then I'm going to take off the other two completely. This one's the easiest for me to reach. You want to be careful of any pinch points. If I'm working on it and I keep dropping it, I might pinch my fingers. Safety first. I'm going to put those two nuts aside. We're going to go ahead and loosen up these bolts right here. This is a nut on this side, bolt end on that side. All I'm going to use is a 24 and another 24. I'm using the wrench to hold it still. I'm using the ratchet to break it free. Once we have these fairly loose, I'll move on to the next step. I do this one, and the front one.

We got our upper ball joint nut, nice and loose. I put it on a couple threads, like I said I was going to do. Next what I'm going to do, and you don't have to do this, this is preference, I'm going to take an 11 millimeter socket, I'm going to break this bleeder screw free, just like this, wearing my safety glasses, of course. Comes trickling out. Now I'm going to take a small screwdriver, I'm going to go between the caliper and the rotor with my bucket under there, make sure I'm catching it. Fluid's going to want to push out, so make sure you don't have your face in front of that bleeder screw. I'm just going to push back this caliper piston a little bit. Doesn't have to be too much, just enough to wiggle it around. I'm going to let it finish trickling out, and wait until I see a solid stream of fluid again, and then I'll close it back up with my 11 millimeter.

The reason why I did that is basically just so when I take off these two caliper bracket bolts, and I want to remove this caliper bracket from the rotor and the hub assembly, it's going to be able to come off very easily and go back on nice and easily. We can wait a little while to do this, wait for it to bleed out if you want. For me, I'm going to end up bleeding it out anyways, so I don't need to worry too much about it. But if you did end up do it this way, you'd want to make sure that you had a solid stream of fluid coming out. If you had the option, you'd want to either bleed it out yourself, for the bleeder, you can do it on your own, or you can have somebody get in the vehicle and bleed the system with you.

This looks good enough for now because I'm just going to do the bleed anyways. I'm going to close it back up with my 11. I'm going to take my 21 millimeter socket back here, and I'm going to go ahead and remove these two bolts. I'm going to take the caliper, and I'm going to find a place to hang it, preferably off the frame and out of the way. You don't want it hanging from the hose. If you do that, you could cause a pull or a tug. It'll get a little bubble in here, or even a crack or a tear. God forbid if something like ever happens and you do happen to see a tear or a bubble, just replace the hose. Safety first is the number one concern. Brakes are high pressure systems.

I'm wearing gloves. It keeps my hands safe from this brake fluid. If you're not wearing gloves, you want to make sure that you get off as much of this brake fluid as possible so you don't get it on your skin. It's hygroscopic so it's going to absorb moisture, it's going to get into your bloodstream. It could be bad for you. Is bad for you, is what I should say.

Now I'm going to remove these bolts, using a 21 millimeter. You can use a ratchet, a wrench, an airgun. I have access to an airgun so I'm going to go ahead and blast it. Get that one out. I'm just going to turn it in a couple threads, so now my caliper bracket won't fall off when I remove my last one. Let's see if I can in over here. This one, I can remove completely. I'm just going to wiggle the bracket around. This is what the bolt looks like. I'll remove the second one. Actually, I'll grab my hanging tool. You can use whatever you got, a coat hanger, wire tie, whatever you have access to. If it seems like it's still a little stuck, you can go ahead and turn it out a little further with your airgun, air tool. Holding the bracket, there we are. I remove the second one. I'm going to put it safely aside. I took note that both bolts are the exact same. I don't have to worry about which one goes where.

Now that we've got this off, we can take a peek in here, look at our brake pads, make sure everything looks pretty good, no cracking or broken pieces. Looks decent, so I'd say we can save those. Now, you can hang this anyway you want, just as long as it's keeping most of pressure off of this brake hose. You might see that it's a little taunt. It's really not too bad. This is holding up the majority of the weight. If I want to I can go and hold it a little closer. That takes off even more of the weight.

I'm going to remove this rotor, just get it out of the way so we're safe. Big, fabulous hammer time. I'm going to go ahead and whack it. I got my nut on here. I know that it's not going to come free and just come slamming down, hurt anybody, myself. I'm going to hit right here, closest to where the stud is. What should happen is, this is going to break free. The ball joint's going to want to lift up. You'll just notice it moves around a little bit, and from there we can move on.

Here we are. We might want to hit it a couple more times, but let's be real, that's enough. I'm going to remove that nut and lift up on it, move our knuckle out of the way. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to remove our outer tire out-end nut, right here. I'm going to use an airgun with a 21 millimeter socket. I'm just going to put it on there, and I'm going to try to blast away. Wearing my safety glasses, safety first. That came off nice and easy. Very simple.

Now what we can do is we can go ahead and whack right here with our big fabulous hammer, or even if you wanted to you can go here, but I prefer to go right on the knuckle. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try to break this outer tire out-end free from the knuckle. That wasn't hard enough, huh? Let's hit it again. I just want to make sure I move my ABS cable out of the way. It's very clear, I don't have to worry about anything with it. Broke free nice and easy. If you wanted to and you didn't want to worry about this thing slapping around, you could take that nut that's on the floor, put your control arm back through here, and use your nut to hold it stable.

Next, we're going to take off the axle nut. We're going to use our 36 millimeter socket. We're going double check, make sure it fits on there pretty good. It's a little loose, but if I grabbed a 34, it wouldn't go on at all, so I'm going to go ahead and try this one. I'm going to be turning it to the left, and I'm going to hold this. This is the hub. I'm just going to hold the studs on it. I'm going to see if I can get this free. It's coming off. There we are.

Next what we want to do is we would want to try to push this axle back through the knuckle or through the bearing. If it doesn't seem... It does seem like it wants to move. If it didn't though, you could take a punch and a hammer, or if you have an air chisel, you want to go right in this little divot right here, and try to push it through. You want to be very careful not to just use a regular hammer and whack away, because if you damage these threads right here, you're going to use something such as a file or a tap, or replace the axle to fix it.

If you didn't have a punch or anything like that and you were just like, "Len, what do I do?" You can go ahead and do something like that and this is kind of the last resort really. You want to put this on so it's back flush with the end of the end of the axle. I would go a little bit further on, obviously. Then you can go ahead and whack on this with a hammer and try to at least get it to break free. Of course, spray a little bit of penetrant in there first. I'm not going to worry about it for this application, because the axle actually came out very easily. Now that we know that we've got that broken free, we can go ahead and move on to the next step.

Right here you have an axle boot. When we drop this knuckle down, what's going to happen? This is going to come down, hit up against your lower control arm. You're going to be pulling and moving and twisting. If you rip this boot, you're going to cause yourself an issue, and that'll be a video for another day, I'm sure. But generally speaking, it would be easiest to just replace the axle at that point. We know we've got the ABS cable broken free. That's not hanging on to anything. We're pretty much going to be all set. Once this comes free right here, this knuckle could come down. You might not even need hammer it yet. We want to make sure that we're holding on to it. Once we get this nut off all the way, we're going to go ahead and put it on a couple more threads, so we can make sure that this knuckle can't fall off, and then we'll go ahead and hit on this with our big fabulous hammer, and see if we can break it free, then we'll be clear to hold the knuckle and take that nut completely off.

Here we go. Using our 24 millimeter socket, there we are. That's pretty much ready to come off. Just show you what it looks like. I'm going to go on a couple threads. This is just to catch it. If I don't have this on and I got my foot under here, and I'm whacking away with a hammer, and this thing comes falling off, Len's going to be hurting. I don't want that. I got that nut on there, it's definitely not going to come off. Now what you want to do, is you want to try to hit on the knuckle as close as you can without banging on this backing plate.

I'm going to go ahead and move this outer tire rod out of the way, just rest it up there, wherever you want to put it. I'm going to start hitting right here. If you want to you could use something such as pickle fork, see if you can under there. It might be a little bit more difficult than this. But last case resort, you might have to do something like that. I'm just going to whack it. First I'm going to give it a little spray. You can't go wrong with some penetrant. It just works its way in, especially with the vibrations of the hammer. I'm going to hit right here. You can hit wherever you want, but this is pretty much the closest I got for hitting area, and I'm going to try not to hit this backing plate. Nice.

As you could see, it broke free. We don't need to hit it anymore. If you're in your driveway doing this on the ground, you might want to, but I'm not going to. So, here's our nut again. I'm holding the knuckle. I'm going to see if I can this to come down and out. As you can tell, I'm pulling the knuckle down and out, and that's because I want to pull it out from the axle right here, and down from the ball joint right there. All the meanwhile, being very careful not to pitch this boot. Let's see if we can get it. You might have to twist and shout and do all sorts of fun stuff. There it is. We've removed our knuckle.

Here we go. We're getting down to the nitty gritty of getting this lower control arm out. We got the knuckle off, we got the upper ball joint and everything like that. Everything's nice and secure and out of the way. What are we going to do with this axle? Well, you can go ahead and remove it if you want. For this application I'm not going to worry about that, but if you did need to, you could spray right in the backside there, and then come from the back with a little chisel, or a pry bar and a hammer. Pop it right off, slide it out and put it out of the way. I'm not. I'm just going to secure it, doing something a little bit like this. You can do however you would want to do it. You can use the hook. I'm not worried about that. Just go like this. I could put it up here, you could put it up there, wherever I want to put it, really, just as long as it's up and out of my way.

Next what I like to do is I like to remove this sway bar link from the lower control arm. You can replace this if you wanted to. I'm just going to take some of these locking pliers, I'm going to grab up here, make it as tight as I can. That's tight. Next, I'm going to take an 18 millimeter socket. I have access to an airgun, so I'm going to go ahead and use that. That came off nice and easy. I'm going to remove my pliers. Now this is going to be able to break free from there. I'm going to be replacing this for my video, but if you aren't, what you can do is you can go ahead put this on here, so it's pretty much level and then thonk it with your hammer. Something like this. You can see that it broke free, so that's good enough for now.

Next what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and remove this nut right here, from this side of the bolt. I'm going to use a 21 millimeter on the bolt side, and a 24 on the nut side. I'm going to hold it stable with the bolt side, and I'm going to remove the nut side, so turning to the left, there's our nut. This bolt feels like it's going to come right out, so that's nice. If we had to we could just use a little ratchet and just keep turning it to the left and it should work its way out. We could also go something like this. That should be helpful to try to move the control arm around a little bit. I'm going to move the strut around a little bit. We've got our bolt, we've got our nut, they still go together perfectly. We didn't mess up any threads. If we did, we want to chase those out. We're just going to remember that the bolt came in through the backside.

Here we go. Hammer time. We're going to use our big, fabulous hammer. We're just going to try to tap this down, essentially trying to pull the control arm down and the stud out. I'm going to come under here, I'm going to try to hold up this axle so it doesn't come slamming down. It's starting to separate. If we want we can use a little bit of penetrant there, and give it a blast. Here we go. We're going to do it again. Getting closer. Let that down. Our axle doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. We're going to hold onto our shock strut assembly, whatever you want to call it. We'll remove our last nut. Now we've removed our strut assembly.

Today we have a product comparison between our old strut and our new strut. You can call it a shock if you want. I call it a strut. Anyways, old, new. This is out of the 2016 Ram 1500, and this is a quality 1A Auto part. We just want to compare them, make sure they're about the same, if not exactly the same. We got the same mounting holes for the bottom, got the same length from top to bottom. That's nice. We have the same mounting. If I spin it a little bit you can see. There we are, so I don't see any reason why this quality A1 Auto part shouldn't fit great in this vehicle. If you need this part, or any other part, you can always come to 1AAuto.com.

Something that I wanted to make note of, is that this isn't a perfect triangle right here, between the three of these studs. You can see that this is a much shorter distance between here and here, and there and there. What you want to do is you want to look up under the vehicle and see which way it goes. I already have. I found that the pointy end or the longer end, faces out, so if you wanted to, you could remove this sticker as well. It's going to be hidden. Now it's stuck to my glove. I'm just going to get rid of that. There we go.

I'm just going to find the holes under there. This stud should come up and through, hopefully. There we are. I'm going to put that nut back there so I can find it later. Just tighten this, and that one. Then I'm just throw on my last nut. I'm going to go ahead and snug these up. Basically I'm just going to bottom it out, and then we're going to go ahead and torque these down to 40 foot-pounds. We had our torque wrench set to 40 foot-pounds. I'm just going to do this to all three of these. Then for good measure, I'll just go around again. There it is.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to lift up this control arm, and I'm going to put this sway bar link stud through the control arm. If your sway bar link happened to look like this one, you can go ahead and replace it. We sell these at 1A Auto. That'll be another video. For the purpose of this one though, I'm going to continue with what I've got. I'm going to go ahead and move this over, hopefully. Lift this up. I'm going to see if I can get this all lined up all at once. It's going to be interesting, but we can do it. Take my little hammer, see if I can bonk it up a little bit.

Once I get that started through, I can take my sway bar link nut, see if we can get it started on straight. Sometimes they like to go on crooked. Here we are. I'm going to zap this on with my 18 millimeter. Put it in forward, we're turning to the right. Okay, we remember this. We're going to grab our locking pliers. I'm just going to go ahead and grab onto it. I'm going to try blasting it again. Feels pretty good. Nice. Now we can move along. We can go ahead and get this bolt through here, and get all this going.

Now we're going to go ahead and put our bolt back through. If you want you can use a little bit of thread locker. For this application I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to come through from the backside. See if I can get this lined up. It might be difficult. It usually is. Holy moly. That was easier than I thought. Tap it through. My 24, put this on here. Now I can grab my 24 socket, my 21 millimeter wrench, blast these in, and then I'm going to torque them down. It feels like it's sufficiently bottomed out. Now I'm going to torque it. We got our torque wrench, we got our 24, we're going to go ahead and torque this nut to 125 foot-pounds. I've got my 21 millimeter wrench on the backside that I'm going to use to hold. There it is. I'm going to hit it one more time. That feels good.

Now it's time to get our knuckle back on. We're going to bring it over. We're going to try to line up this hole with this, this hole with this, this hole with this, this hole with this. Good luck, right? Here we go. We'll bring it over. Let's see what we need to do here. I'm going to hold it up with my leg, being very careful not to poke myself, get that one going. Now we don't have to hold as much pressure on this. Come over here, pull down on that, get this one started in. I'm going to save this one, because I want to do this, so we'll go ahead and tighten these down, bottom them out and then we'll torque them. We've got our nut down here for the lower ball joint, 24 millimeter socket. I'm just going to bottom it out. That's good for that.

We're going to the top with our 21. I'm using a swivel. If you're using a ratchet, good luck. Here we are. Both of those are bottomed out. Now we can go ahead and find the torque spec and torque them down. All right, so we're just going to go to our 38 foot-pounds with our 24 millimeter socket. Here we are. Then we're going to go ahead and go another 90 degrees, so it's bottomed out. You can use your torque wrench still, if you want. Other people would rather not. I'm just going to do it. Basically I'm going to give it about a quarter turn. It's an approximation. If you have a degree torque wrench, you can use that. That would probably be great. For this application I'm not going to worry too much about it. Then we'll go ahead and move up to the upper. We're going to have to change our socket up.

Now that we've got this torqued to our 40 foot-pounds, we're going to have to bring this 180 degrees around, which would be facing the exact opposite direction, plus a little bit. I'm going to use my little crayon here. You can use whatever you got. I'm just going to put a little mark on my socket. Basically I want this to come all the way around to the backside there, and then it's going to end up pretty much here by the time I'm done. All right. I feel like I've got it just about there. I could have gone a little less, might have been better, but it's not going to hurt anybody. It's definitely not going to fall off. Everything still moves. It flows nicely.

We've got our axle nut here. We're going to go ahead and start it on. Could use a little bit of thread locker. It's all preference. I'm going to put this on with the gun. With this though, you don't want to put it on and hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, because it's going to crush in your bearing and you're going to have bearing issues. Once we get it bottomed out, I'm going to go ahead and torque it down to 185 foot-pounds. Once again, we're using our 36 millimeter socket, so I'm going to get it down so it's bottomed out. Then we'll get it down to a lower level where I can torque it. That feels pretty good. Let's torque this puppy.

What I did is I just put my bar in between here. I want to make sure that it's as flat as possible for when it hits up against these studs. You don't need to be in a diamond or anything like that, because God forbid, you mess up these threads on the studs, you'll be having to chase them down. I'm going to take my 36 millimeter socket and my torque wrench. I'm going to torque this down to 185 foot-pounds. That's all torqued up. We're clear to move onto the next step.

I'm just going to go ahead and clean up around the hub a little bit. If you notice large chunks of anything, you want to try to make sure you get all that off. You don't have to worry about the color of rust, it's not going to hurt anybody. It's going to be buried underneath your rotor. The reason for making sure you got off any big chucks is to make sure that the rotor sits flush up against your hub. If it doesn't, you'll get a brake pulsation. I'm just going to go around. You can hit this with a little bit of brake parts cleaner or whatever you might have. That looks pretty decent. We'd do the same thing for the rotor, make sure that the mating surface is in pretty good condition. You could put a little bit of copper never seize if you'd like. We'll go ahead and put the rotor on, make sure it's secured, then we'll move on to the next step.

Get that cleaned up. Go ahead and put this on there. If you wanted to you could use a lug nut, put that on there to hold the rotor. You don't want it flopping around too much. Every time it moves, you've got another chance of rust getting down in between, causing an issue, or this falling off and hurting yourself. Obviously we don't want. We'll go ahead and see if we can get a lug nut on there. We might need to use a little bit of spacer. If you have something that'll work, that would be optimal. For the purpose of this video I'm just going to go with something that pretty much everybody has lying around at some place or another. Just a little clamp, just put it over the stud, and go ahead and put this lug nut on. Push the rotor up against. The clamp's just working as a spacer. We're not going to tighten this down or anything and crush that, it's not about that. It's just holding the rotor still.

Next what we're going to do, we're going to make sure our ABS cable is clear and out of the way. We're going to take our two caliper bracket bolts, they're both the same, you don't have to worry about mixing them up, exact same. We're going to take our caliper with the bracket attached, carefully remove it. Get rid of that. Get this puppy on here. It should slide right on. Oh, yeah. There we go. Get some started. Now we can take our 21 millimeter socket, we'll bottom these out and then we'll grab the torque specification and torque them down. Making sure that I'm turning to the right to tighten. That's one, two. We'll torque these puppies up. Using our 21 millimeter socket, we're going to go ahead and torque these down to 130 foot-pounds with our torque wrench. One, two, there we go. We torqued these to 130 foot-pounds with our 21 millimeter socket.

We've got our ABS wire, we're going to put it right in here. There's a little clip. Try to wiggle it and jiggle it, and all that. I have a little clip here, clip that in. Behind here we've got our little harness. Take a peek in there, make sure there's no funny colors, greens, blue, reds, purples, nothing, looks not a color. Nice. We're going to look where our lock was and where it's going to be. Lines up this way. The red thing's going to line up with right here, so we know. Clip that in, give it a little tug. Feels good. We're going to make sure we re-secure it to the underfoot. Just pushes through. Everything feels like it's nice and secure.

If this clip right here was broken for some reason, maybe you broke it coming off, you don't want to leave your ABS cable just rattling around. If you have a little wire tie, you can go ahead and put that on there, fairly loosely, just enough so that it'll keep it adhered to the brake hose, but not necessarily that it's going to pinch the brake hose. You don't want to pinch the brake hose. Fluid needs to flow. But this ABS wire does need to be mounted to the flex hose, so it doesn't go flopping around and get caught on anything.

We have our outer tire rod locking nut. You can tell it's a locking nut because it has this red around here. It's neoprene. Where this has already been on and come back off, it might be a good habit to go ahead and put on a little bit thread locker, because the odds that this going to work the way it should, where it's already been used, it's minimal. But for this application I'm not going to worry about it. It's up to your preference, what you want to do. I'm going to go ahead and put the tire rod back through. I'm going to put our nut on. This is a 21 millimeter head. I'm going to go ahead and zip this on. I'm just going to bottom it out, and then I'm going to go ahead and torque it down to the specifications.

If for some reason you are trying to tighten it and the stud was just spinning, you could go ahead and use a pry bar and try to push down on the tire rod, in between here and here, just to give it a little bit of downward pressure and hopefully lock that stud into the knuckle. It went in fine, so I'm not going to worry about it, but that would be what I would do in that case. Torque specification for this is 22 foot-pounds, so I've got it on my torque wrench with my 21 millimeter. All right. Now we're going to go plus 90 degrees. If we went from here to here, that would be 180 degrees. We want to go half of that, so basically I'm going to bring this around to you. Here we go. We'll call that about 90. This is all torqued up, now we're clear to go ahead and remove this lug nut when we're ready.

We can go ahead and take this back off. Recycle this, or keep it for something handy, maybe you can use it again someday, like I like to do. We're at the last point here. What we're going to do is we're going to make sure we get all the air out of here. We're going to use our 11 millimeter socket. You break this free, turning to the left, like that. See a little air bubble. We want to wait until see solid fluid coming out. It looks like it's pretty good. I'm wearing a glove, so I can do this. Don't do it with your bare hands, please. That looks pretty good. If you wanted to, you can give your caliper a little tap. Make sure you're wearing safety glasses in case anything spits out at you. Just keep an eye out for any little air bubbles. As soon as you don't see any air bubbles, you're clear to close it back up, to the right.

If you wanted to, you could do a manual bleed on this. For this purpose, I would say that it's fine. Once we get it cleaned up, we would make sure we put on this little boot. At that point, you'd be clear to put your wheel back on, and then drive her on down to a reputable service shop and get it aligned. There we go. Easy peasy.

Now it's time to get the wheel up on here. I want to make sure I emphasize on the importance of not lifting with your back. You want to make sure that you're safe, you don't hurt yourself. Don't grab your tire like this and expect to go, oh, and lift it up. It's big. All I'm going to do is, I'm going to roll it up my leg. I'm going to use my abs. That's why I have them, right? Roll it up. Lift my leg with my abs. It comes right up nice and easy. I hardly used my back at all. Save your back, you're going to need it someday, or every day. I got one lug nut on there, now I can let go of the wheel. I'll get my other four on. I'll just bottom them out and then we're going to torque them down to 130 foot-pounds.

We've got our 22 millimeter socket, our torque wrench set to 130 foot-pounds. We're going to go ahead and we're going to start with one, and we're going to make a star pattern. If we want to, we can go around again, just to double check. I'll just go around again. Now that I know they're all torqued down, you can go in a circle if you want, or continue your star pattern. There we go. Now we've got it all torqued up to 130 foot-pounds, and we've completed our job. Great job everybody.

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