Rev up your engines, today in an attempt to save you money and
still have quality parts at the same time, I'm going to talk about quick struts on your
car, now when your car rides poorly and your struts
are worn out, a lot of guys are scared of changing them
out because they're worried they're going to be injured compressing the spring,
taking it apart and putting it together, so many people think about buying these quick
struts that come with all the pieces you need, instead of just buying the shock absorbing
part like this, and taking the old one apart and reusing the
spring, and reusing the strut mount and all the other pieces over,
now changing out the strut assembly by using a quick strut is a lot easier,
all you have to do is take off a few bolts here,
the brake line, and then these two giant bolts top and bottom,
and then you go to the top back inside the car,
and you just remove 1,2,3 bolts and the whole assembly then just slides out,
and you slide the new one in, so it's an easy job,
and you don't have to deal with these dangerous springs when their compressed, like this illustrates,
and if you make a mistake taking these apart, these springs can be dangerous,
don't try this at home but watch what can happen,
now there is one big problem with these quick struts,
how do you know if your getting good ones, now I've been a mechanic for 50 years and
people are always asking me, Scotty how do you know you're getting a good part or not,
well it's called experience, I've seen companies come, I've seen them go,
I've seen good companies go bad, I've seen good companies stay the same,
I've seen new companies that were good, I've seen new companies that were horrible,
so the only way you can tell is by actual experience with those parts,
so in that case, this Leacree company sent me a pair of struts for my wife's Lexus,
so rather than you taking a chance with these things,
I have in an experiment, so I put two of them on my wife's Lexus,
and you have to realize that even those this Lexus is 17 years old, it still has the original
struts and it still rides perfectly fine, but was doing this as an experiment,
and being a professional mechanic with all my air tools it only took be about 45 minutes
to replace them both then I drove it around, and guess what,
it rode worse than it did with the 17 year old original struts,
and as a double blind of this experiment, I didn't tell me wife what I did to her car,
so she drove it around and a couple of days later she said,
boy my car is really riding poorly whats going on here,
I explained to her I had put these Chinese made aftermarket struts on her car and she
said put the old ones back on it was working fine that way,
so I put the old ones back on, then she was happy because it was riding perfect again,
but being curious of course, I'm wondering why do these brand new beautiful looking ones
with all new parts work worse than ones were 17 years old,
well here's what I found, well first I measured the spring diameter
of the quick strut, and that was 14.9 millimeters,
then I measured the spring diameter of the factor struts,
and it was 13.6 millimeters, so the new quick strut assembly had thicker
springs than the factory one, you might think thicker is better,
no it's going to make it ride rougher, these guys at Lexus spent a lot of time designing
the correct springs for their cars, they don't want thicker springs,
that's what you got, it rode rougher, I saw it rode rougher, my wife who didn't even know
I changed them said it rode rougher, not a good idea if you want to get a good ride in
a fancy car, and I also noticed the car was sitting higher,
it wasn't sitting the same way it was designed, then I looked at their directions and it says,
oh warning your car might sit higher when you put these on,
well that's crazy they're obviously not made correctly,
I took the quick strut apart, this is the quick strut mount,
and this is a factory OEM strut mount, when I popped out the bearing of the quick
strut one, it came apart and had these cheesy little
ball bearings inside, but when I took out the factory one the bearing
is a sealed unit, it's sold and much better made, it's going to last a lot longer and
it's going to ride better, plus when I measured the depth where the top
of the strut rod sits on the new unit, that was 14.6 millimeters,
but on the OEM strut mount, it was 21 millimeters, so of course that's going to sit differently
so that's probably why the thing rode higher, I mean the whole thing was just a big mistake
but at least it was one that I made to test out for you and you don't waste your money
doing it yourself, and sure we all want to save money and this
Leacree strut was only $88.29, while the factory Lexus strut is $793.67,
and when it comes to buying these quick struts, hey you got to do some research beforehand,
I found that companies that people have heard of that have a good image,
they had the same kind of reviews, they said these use to be great but the one I had was
a pile of junk it lasted 20,000 miles or it made noise,
research if your thinking about using a quick strut,
now I have seen people use these quick struts in some situations like they got a car and
it's completely shot, they hardly ride at all,
the struts are leaking and it bounces like mad,
and at least it rides better, sometimes they do it right before they sell the car or they
say, I'm only going to keep it a year, I'll put these cheaper ones on and save money and
I'll just live with whatever they do, but if you want to keep your car a long time
and want to have a good ride, my advice is, get a quality strut cartridge
assembly replacement, use the spring and the suspension bearing on the top over,
I got this high quality bearing assembly at Auto Zone for $63, it was exactly the same
as Lexus OEM, so you don't have to spend $723 for the factory stuff and buy it all,
you can replace the parts with quality parts, just don't expect a quick strut to be a very
good fix if you keep your car for a long time, because a lot of these manufacturers of these
quick struts, they're sneaky, some of them say, assembled
in USA you know that doesn't mean that much, that only means that it could be very cheap
parts from China that were just finally assembled in the United States,
and it doesn't matter where junk is put together, if it's junk it's still going to be junk no
matter where you put it together, now if it says made in the USA there's very
strict laws for that kind of stuff, but you'll often see many of these things
just say assembled in the USA and that doesn't really mean anything when it comes to quality,
so now you know a bit more about quick struts in your car,
and you can make a wise decision yourself, so if you never want to miss another one of
my new car repair videos, remember to ring that bell!