Sooooooo ...
Bought this 02 4Runner a few weeks back. 122000 on the clock and although not in bad condition, its clearly not had a lot of maintenance done beyond the oil changes and break-fixes. Amongst other things it was still on its original factory shocks, which were clearly shot and the vehicle was floundering all over the road when it got bumpy. So I ordered the replacement shocks online - nothing fancy, just the standard Monroe ones, thinking that surely it couldn't be too difficult surely? Boy was I in for a surprise. I have the Hayes manual, and it didn't make it seem like too much of a challenge, but boy were they wrong too!

Rear:
I guess I'm lucky that the car's history is TX and OK so its not had much in the line of wet salted roads, just a fair bit of dust. None of the bolts on the underside are corroded, just a little stiff.
Firstly, if anyone tells you the top bolt for the rear shocks is a little difficult to get hold of, they're bloody lying. If you follow the workshop manual suggestion of raising the vehicle by jacking up the axle, and you're not skinny and double jointed, you're not getting to that bolt. Ever.
The only way to get a regular sized arm through all the plumbing on the left rear to that bolt is by jacking the vehicle under the axle and letting it rest on a jack stand under the chassis, and then letting the jack down, which will lower the axle, which will let you get your arm over the top of the axle and get to the bolt.

Needless to say you will already have removed the tire and the spare to give yourself room to work.

Once I got a wrench on the top and managed to rotate the shaft via the top dust cover section, which is welded onto the shaft, to wedge the wrench against something solid, I had to resort to a pipe-wrench, more traditionally used by plumbers, to get sufficient grip and torque onto the dust-cover to rotate the shaft and unscrew it. Note that this wrecks the cover and renders the shock unusable, but it does get it out. The tricky bit is keeping sufficient tension on the wrench you've wedged onto that top nut so that it doesn't drop off the nut.

Putting the new one in is a synch by comparison.

Also, the left rear seemed to be a damn side harder to get to, and there were a whole lot of cable-runs and bundles and other pipes running in the immediate vicinity. Although the right rear appears to have less space and access because of the exhaust system, it was, in fact, significantly more accessible.

Oh, the nut on the top rear is a 14mm, FWIW. Couldn't find that information anywhere and given how damn difficult it is getting in there I was lucky to have guessed it right first time.

Front:
Again, the damn manual makes the removal sound fairly straight forward. It is not as cramped as the rear top to be sure, but its not a trivial removal, and the fitting of the replacement can be quite challenging. I opted for the entire strut assembly replacement, as I had no intention of dicking around with spring compressors for various reasons. In hindsight the spring compressors might have come in handy even with a fully assembled strut assembly.

Anyway. For removal there are three nuts on top of the assembly which bolt it into the chassis, and one big mother bolting it to the bottom swing arm.

NOTE: do under NO circumstances attempt to undo that top center nut. If you're going to re-use the strut assembly do the spring compression thing once the entire assembly has been removed from the car.

Even though the manual does not suggest it, I would very strongly suggest detaching the stabilizer bar where it bolts onto the bottom arm as well. It makes it a lot easier to attach the new one. Do the stabilizer bar detachment first, and then the top bolt closest to the chassis, as this is a bugger to get off, and get to - there's no room for a ratchet or anything other than a regular spanner in there, and it can take a while to remove.
The remove the rearmost nut, and loosen the nut closest to you last of all. It is best not to remove this nut completely at this point.

Now move onto that nasty mother-sized nut and bolt holding the bottom of the shock in place. What no one tells you, even though it is blindingly obvious in hindsight, is that even with the suspension hanging (vehicle should, as for the rear, be supported by the chassis), there is still tension in that strut assembly. Getting that big bolt out can be quite tricky, and when you do manage to remove it, the bottom attachment of the shock will most likely pop out of its mounting bracket by at least 1/3 inch. Once this has happened, you can carefully let the strut assembly crop out of its mountings by removing that last top nut completely.

Attaching the new strut is pretty much the reverse of removal, except you now need to content with that extra 1/3 inch of tension, and its a pretty beefy spring you're fighting against. This is the reason I removed the stabilizer bar nut: you can now force the whole swing-arm assembly down far enough to be able to wedge the bottom of the strut assembly into its bracket. It helps having something to use as a lever - something long and strong, and a second pair of hands.

Once the strut assembly is back in place, I used a second jack to lift the entire swing-arm to get the bolt back into place for the stabilizer bar attachment.

I hope that this helps someone.

 

TO make the bottom bolt a sinch take the pickle jack that comes with the truck stock and wedge it between the control arm and the frame. Before you loosen the old struts large bottom bolt jack it up to place tension on it and then tap the bottom bolt out.

Once this is done the new one slides right in and you can adjust the jack as necessary. With a quick strut as I used it was really easy..

 

im planning to replace the shocks in my 98 and i realized that i was a pita to remove that rear shocks top nuts.
post some pictures of this rear shocks removal and other little trick for it

 

I found a REALLY quick way to remove the factory rear shocks. I too had the top nut firmly rusted, so after removing the lower shock mounting bolt I got a good grip on the dust boot with a pipe wrench. After about a dozen very small turns (<10 degrees) the shaft and nut snapped off cleanly. Hmm...

The frame section that the shaft goes through is pretty darn heavy. Did a little head scratching and decided to try to just snap the shaft on the next one.

So on side two I unscrewed the lower shock bolt and pulled the shock free. Then just pushed and pulled on the shock (enough to bend the shaft each time). After a short time I was able to rotate the shock 180 degrees between pulls to make each pull more effective. Sucker snapped clean off in no time!

Again, these were factory shocks with 150k+ miles on them. The top stud/shaft on aftermarket shocks may be beefier, so use this method at your own risk.

 

I did the exact same thing on my old factory shocks. The nuts were so rusted there was no way they were coming off.

http://www.ultimateyota.com/index.ph...&topic=8320.15

The rusted nut:


How I accessed the top of the shock to put the new ones in. Lucky enough I also have a 1.5" body lift so it wasn't too bad:

 

I was not able to get enough of a grip on the top bolts for the rear shocks, so I lifted the body from the frame and accessed it through there.