Commodore: Boot struts replaced
After watching someone with a fancy minivan wave their hand in front of the tailgate and have it magically rise on it’s own, Sabriena said that she’d like something like that on our next car. Why? Because since she hurt her back, she’s found opening the boot of our VE Commodore difficult and at times painful.
It’s hopefully going to be ages before we replace our car, but I figured that it was probably possible to adjust the spring on the boot to make it not so heavy. So when we got home, I looked it up, and no - there are no springs on the boot on this model at all. In fact, they’re just a pair of gas struts that handle the soft-close and weight offset functions, and apparently when they go out you get the exact situation we’re seeing: a heavy boot lid.
Looking it up, they’re not expensive - there are two, and most places had them for about A$40 each. SuperCheap Auto has them, “Ezilift” EL2071 are the ones for the boot on a VE sedan, and they were about A$75 for the pair. That’s cheap enough to gamble on the old ones still being fine, so we picked some up this morning, and when we got home after our errands I set about changing them.
Swapping them out is pretty easy: open the boot all the way, pop off the little metal retention clip (it slides down towards the tip, doesn’t need to come all the way off) on each end, and pop the strut out, and then clean the dusty grease off the nipples the strut sits on. Replacing the new one in took me a bit of figuring out, because I did not read about this beforehand. The strut is ever so slightly too long, and compressing the strut by hand is basically a non-starter.
But what you can do is close the boot lid slightly, and then there’s a plastic bump stop on each side that you can pop off to open it a tiny bit further. Do that, and the struts pop on with a tiny bit of effort. Push the clips back down, close the boot lid slightly and put the bump stops back on, and then test.
And the result? Both Sabriena and I nearly smacked ourselves in the chin with the spoiler when we opened it the first time. So yeah, I would say the old ones were buggered. You now trivially open the boot one handed - and you only lift it an inch or two and it opens itself.
I should have done this years ago, they were likely wore out when we bought it. I’m now side-eyeing the ones on the bonnet as well.
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Horsham, VIC, AustraliaNavigation: Older Entry Newer Entry