I'm gonna try and walk you through quickly the process of changing the brakes in the shruts on the front of a 2005 2007 roughly GM minivan a couple of different versions out there this is a Saturn relay 2005 similar to an upland ER or pontiac montana Buick terraza that kind of thing you can see the old strut still here nice and rusty and no longer serving its purpose like it should you're gonna need a couple things if you don't have a pair tool I recommend a mallet your name's your ratchet a 13/16 socket upside-down alright a 15 millimeter wrench 15 millimeter socket couple of random tools for what you may come across I've already done the brakes and rotors pretty easy there if you're diving into a strut then I'm assuming you can do a Riveter and break fifteen millimeter bolts on the bracket as well as the caliper I'm pretty straightforward you don't have to have a special tool as in the rear end to decompress the caliper just a c-clamp so works that well there now be careful when you're moving your caliper out of the way you know pinch or break your brake line use a jack stand if you have to to prop this up while you're doing your pads and rotors rotors slide off nice and easy getting that any issues with that at all alright so jumping into it got your socket your ratchet I've already broke this first one loose a little difficult by hand still but one handed to the Lockeford that is how I impact to get these bolts to break loose all right so that one started on that one we'll do the same thing with bolt number two this is a 15 millimeter you're gonna need for that pretty straightforward that's when you're gonna use your standard wrench here try not to use the open data side in case you have issues I'll warn you that when you go to break this free at some point the actual thread is going to start to may start to spin I put a little pair of vise grips on that to hold it in place once this broke loose up at the top underneath here we've got three bolts I mean you can just vaguely make out the back - you're going to need to use pretty much exclusively this guy here um sadly I don't have one that ratchets you're gonna want to invest in that or borrow one it'll save you tons of time and I'm already to the driver's side the only thing different you need to know about the driver side is you got to take off your fuse panel over there and that's held on with some 10 millimeter nuts on some tiny bolts let's see I will break here start pulling a few nuts loose and go from there all right you can see here I've already busted these two loose I guess what I should mention is this I wish I could remember the terminology there are this is grooved into the bracket this side will not spend so all you've got to worry about is this bolt over here again a 13/16 right here I've already got this broke free like I showed you like I said I'll show you here I had to use this extra wrench to help hold this threaded bolt from sway bar link in order to get it the rest of the way okay so we got this guy off of here now until you actually break the strut free a little bit this is gonna be pretty hard to maneuver but first what I'm gonna do is I'm going to work on hammering these things out of their seat here one of the safest things you can do is thread the nut back on a little bit before you use your mallet spray it a lot more around PB Blaster on here you may want to try using a torch eating this thing up a little bit but spray it I'm gonna give it a few taps until it comes free and this could be a lengthy process so don't expect great fast results by any means alright give you guys a better look here you can see what I'm in about the grooves hold itself in place when it's lit in this one is just about done I don't want to bore you guys with too much of the hands on the idea I don't want to skip anything - this is pretty straightforward and if you've never done the back shocks before they're even easier so those are both about ready to come out you see here I've set the tire underneath the rotor once you remove these two bolts the control arm is gonna drop once we get to that point we're gonna come back up here you can see sort of the location of the three bolts to the bottom not very well we're gonna go up top work on removing those three and that's going to allow the strut to drop down and when this drops down what we want to be careful of is not damaging the boots or brake lines that sort of thing so here you see one of the boats all the way out give you a better idea what you're dealing with you'll notice here that the control arm mount and the strut mount have started to separate give you a look inside there you can see it's not even anymore what we're gonna do and then what I had to do to get this out is use pretty much anything you've got maybe you got another jack line around use a pry bar whatever you can slide it underneath the rotor enough that you can lift up you take off some of that tension so that you don't end up shearing off threads on these bolts which are important because you got to reuse them both bolts are gone this is already started to slide down a little bit it's not quite on to the tire but every little nudge and bump it moves a little bit more so we're just gonna sweep up from here now you see there one two three and the bolt in the center which you're not gonna mess with that's part of the strut the only thing I really have to use it's gonna get me through this is the box end wrench you can see I can arrange it here right there and you get me through it longer the better here that guy back there it's a little bit easier to reach so this will be easier believe it or not what those little room is there is much easier that one over here all right all right see I got these two off and the last one you got about a quarter inch threads don't go there is just enough room to get a socket pretty standard size as long as you have one that doesn't have a very wide head to it there is enough room underneath this to reach the back a little bit here on the front but the bar is in the way fairly easily I'll finish this up we'll get this to drop down the rest of the way and go from there all right you can see all three bolts are now free from the nut now you can do this one of two ways I use this just to make sure it doesn't slip you can always remove those top nuts before you take out these bottom pins just to keep it from dropping too fast before you get a hold of it these aren't terribly heavy so what I was doing was trying to support it with my right hand roll I loosened it with my left or you can see here I use the screwdriver as a safety as well just give me that little bit of cushion so now this should wiggle free pretty easily and we will work on mounting on the new one to monroe quick strut ordered this soft parts geek a whole lot cheaper that way free shipping and no sales tax that's always cool i'm anyway when you get these minor little goofed up on one side i didn't realize it at the time but right here what do they call this shouts of some sort something very strange you'll get paperwork you'll also get three new bolts or three new nuts for these bolts up here hold onto the old ones just in case this rubber seal for some reason on the first strut i installed on the passenger side was disconnected from up here i didn't know that it was supposed to look like this so i didn't bother with it and i had to go back after I pulled this out of the box and it's probably much easier before you install it to fix that so just remember to check that out alright it's going to take two people to do this safely and properly so what I'm gonna do is stop the video get my lovely wife to help me do this and basically all you got to do is get one bolt started and then your supportive to do the rest of this yourself okay so you see you've got these two just started just to warn you it will take a little bit of finagling and perseverance to get these the me back upright you're going to have to wiggle and jostle and get them just right one thing you can do if you don't have an extra hand is reattach your sway bar link and that will give you the extra support to try and line up these top bolts just enough so you can get at least one started but I would still recommend using a second person because getting all three of those holes lined up is very difficult okay it should be the last bit got all three started up I will tell you that that boats easy the boat straight back there is fairly easy this bolt is extremely difficult if you if you were a fairly large person you probably will not be able to get that bolt started by hand so find a small child somebody I just barely made my bed my hand squeeze underneath of this stinking bar to get that started that was not easy so now all I have to do is tighten those three this is getting tired already like I talked about before make sure your boot is sealed nicely in order to insert these through this bracket the a-frame control arm and the other side of the racket you basically have to shake this bolt and at the same time shake the rotor you'll get it about half way through these grooves and then all you need to do is take your thirteen sixteenths socket and ratchet pull those together get them nice and tight snug your bolts up top and put the wheel back on you're ready to go one thing that's recommended after this is an alignment check so do not forget that hopefully this helps you guys out