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Finished installing a new stereo and having issues sleeping.. so I made some gaskets. I already had this material, so I used it. Probably would have purchased something a little thinner if I was buying specific for this purpose. But.. it worked perfectly.
Quick question...what process did you use to uninstall them...so much pressure on the shock,did you unhook the shock from the lower ball socket?
(These are the Z1 struts) Propped up the hatch with a piece of wood, remove two lower 10mm bolts from one strut, remove strut, form new gasket, reinstall. There was a little back and fourth between me holding the hatch up by hand or letting it rest on the wood support.. but that's about it.
I just finished installing a new pair of liftgate struts today. I purchased my struts (genuine Nissan parts from CourtesyNissan online). They arrived without any hardware which I assumed would be included since the website does not list the hardware at all. So I came here and found a thread mentioning cutting the old struts with a Dremel tool to obtain the ball fasteners on each end of the struts. I also came across several posts where there was mention of difficulty removing the bolts due to the size of the bolt head being an odd size and/or needing to be careful to not break off the bolt heads when trying to release them with a wrench. I had none of these issues.
I removed the struts without any struggle at all. I think the bolts were probably torqued to no more than 20 ft.-lbs. and the size of the bolt heads on the brackets were 10mm. I used a 4" Craftsman crescent wrench to remove the two ball fasteners on the liftgate side of the struts. It then took about 30 minutes to cut the ball sockets down until a flathead screwdriver broke the socket open and the hardware was released. I removed the old "C" rings on each ball end. Once finished I put in the new struts with the old hardware (about 15 minutes) and I was done! The new struts work great. My car is 15 years old with 53K miles. It looks just like my avatar. No mods. Just the OEM optional chrome-plated aluminum alloy wheels which came with the car when I bought it in April 2006.
i had the exact same problem as zakmartin after installing aftermarket ones; where the roof met the hatch, the hatch was higher. HOWEVER, while i cannot say for certain what his cause was, for me it was simply a matter of me making a very rookie mistake during installation
i didn't take photos of the original, and insisted to my girlfriend it was like that. she got annoyed with the wind noise and accused me of installing the bracket on to the chassis backwards. turns out she was absolutely correct
it MUST be installed like this:
looking from above, the bracket should appear convex to you (curving down). if it is installed reverse and concave to you (curving up), it will make the hatch sit higher
i bought cheap ones from eBay for $26 USD in March 2015
they still work 1.5 years later. when it was really cold it would kind of slowly come back down on me. the seals aren't meant for Canadian winter i guess. i just jammed some anti-seize (really) in where the rod goes in and out (don't know what it's called sorry, where the silver part meets the black part? lol) and i have not had a single time where it could not hold up the hatch
oem hatch, oem glass, rear wiper and motor still on it
Thank you for this post. It totally saved me. I was convinced there was something wrong with my new struts. Nope. Just something wrong with me.
