Replacing Lift Struts Quickly & Easily!

[Music] hey dirt farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com has the time come to replace those gas struts on perhaps the back of your car or your toolbox it's not that difficult to do if you know a few things stay tuned and I'll show you [Music] how hey dirt farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com today we're going to show you how to replace the gas struts or the gas Springs that are commonly found in devices such as toolboxes office chairs and as you right here on our car well these struts have been in service for well over a decade they've done a lot of work but it's time to replace them and how we know it is when it gets cold the gate doesn't stay open very well or it doesn't lift as fast and so it's just time to replace them now these work by compressing nitrogen gas using the series of valves in the cylinder as well as the Piston that rides back and forth and in case you're worried about it nitrogen is the most common gas in the atmosphere we breathe accounting for 78% so it's a great use of a natural resource now I was able to easily order these replacement struts from my friends at lifts support depot.com and they knew exactly with their online application tool for what I was using for what model of car and I was able to get this replacement strut now if you think that you can simply grab these and push them together if that happens you've got a defect one because these are incredibly strong so if I try to push them together you can see there is no movement whatsoever and in case you think I'm faking it hey take a look at that all right well let's get to work the first thing you need to do is work safely and the way we do that is by putting a step ladder under this lift gate now you can get really deceived easily about how heavy this tailgate is because if you're like me you've gotten used to those gas struts doing most of the work and you think oh this is maybe 15 20 lbs if you pull those gas struts out and let this go it'll slam so hard that it'll probably break the glass and if you're under it let me assure you you won't like the results so the first thing you got to do is make sure that once we are removing those gas struts that this tailgate will come down on there and not travel down any further I'm going to use this replacement strut as an example so you can clearly see the clips that are on the ends of the piston and the base of the mount here the first thing we need to make sure is that the weight of the tailgate is being supported by the ladder so I'm going to lower it down onto there make sure that's setting there then we're going to go ahead and move back the retainer clip on the worn out strut here we go this may take a little bit of prying gentle prying be careful not to scratch sometimes the clips is going to bounce back in there simply rework it again and move it back out of the way until you get it to stay and there you go you can see that now both the ball studs are exposed there's the first one the second one up there when we're at this stage why don't we take opportunity to put a little bit of grease on those ball studs so that they'll operate and be in service for a long time I recommend some kind of high viscosity grease instead of a spray lubricant like WD40 or a silicone this will stick and it'll serve longer so let's go ahead and put a little bit of a dab on both of those balls and as you can see it's nice and sticky it stays right in place we'll clean up and let's go ahead and install the replacement strut as you can see I've gone ahead and moved the retainer Clips back out of the way while I have it out here instead of up against the car it makes it a lot easier but let's go ahead and install you can install either end but I generally like to start with the one that's on the car body itself instead of the gate so you can see the retainer clip is now holding it so it can't come off we'll simply move the head around change the orientation till it's in line and at this point you're going to take your other hand raise the gate until it lines push on the strut like this and then move the retainer clip until it comes into place well there we go now I want you to notice something and that is the lifting power of this new strut let's take a look over here and see how naturally how much it is raised if you remember that just a few moments ago we easily were able to set that down and just let it sit there Watch What Happens now that is lifting so much power that we have greatly improved the pressure upward just with one strut now what we're going to do in just a moment is just step and repeat and do that on the other side and it's the same exact process everything's mirror set and once we're done we have a great replacement system of the last many years well our friends at lifts supports depot.com provided this great little instruction sheet that I actually use to walk through this want to give them credit where credit is due but wherever that you purchase this from they're likely to provide the same sort of thing as a courtesy we'll go ahead and provide the PDF of this nice sheet and their website address down in our description we really like the product we think you'll like it too for whatever application you're going to use it for hey if you found this video to be helpful won't you like it and better yet why you subscribe to our channel for other great tips around the kitchen out in the shop and in the yard until the next time this is dirt farmer J from dirtfarmer [Music] j.com no