Right, so as the name suggests, I'm going to blog about my project for today, which happened to be changing the rear shocks on my wife's 2002 Toyota Echo. These were perhaps some of the easiest shocks I've ever had the pleasure of changing even though there are a couple of hoops one has to jump through to do it.
First and foremost is that the upper mounting point for these particular shocks happens to be hidden behind the rear bench seat, meaning... You have to remove the seat in order to change the shocks! But all things considered this was relatively easy (as far as removing seats from a vehicle go) and at the same time probably the most time-consuming part of the entire process.
How did I remove the seat you ask? Well here's what you do: first, the lower bench is only retained in the car by a couple of snaps at the front, so reaching under the front lip of the lower bench and giving it a firm jerk in the upwards direction will pop the lower bench right out, just push through the seat-belt fasteners and away it goes. This would also be the ideal time to see just how much creepy, disgusting, weird crap manages to fall beneath a car seat that's been the home to two small children for the last eight years, let me tell you... it can be rather frightening. Although I didn't find anything that looked like it was living (or growing) there were plenty of crumbs, change, pencils and all sorts of other assorted goodies under there.
Now, getting back to removing the rear seat to get at the shocks to actually remove those... The back rest portion of the seat is not as easy to remove as the lower bench but it's not hard in and of itself either. The back rest is simply secured with three bolts along the bottom, once those are removed you simply lift the seat upwards to disengage the hooks that are up there and slide the seat out remembering to pass the seat belts over the headrests.
Once you've got that pesky rear seat out of the way, the upper shock mounts are there plain as day to see and remove. Hold the shock rod secure with a crescent wrench at the top, loosen the retaining nut(s), slide off the mounting grommets and push out the old shock. Of course there's also the lower mounting point of the shock that must be loosened in order to fully remove the shock but this was rather easy to reach (at least for a small guy like myself) by simply sliding under the back side of the car and loosening the single nut that holds the shocks on.
Installation of course is the opposite of removal and is fairly easy as well (assuming you've ever replaced shocks on a vehicle before this one should pose you absolutely no issues, if you've never changed shocks on a vehicle before you probably have no idea what I'm talking about anyway so yeah...). All told, even with having to google to figure out where the upper shock mounting points on this vehicle were, the total job took me a little over an hour to be fully completed and having only spent about $80 on parts and $0 on labor, I think I made out rather well.
