HaerdenC

nopes GS350 and GS300 is a tiny bit different. the part that goes into the differential is smaller and shorter ... only a few milimeters. However the ones from an IS220d IS250 same age are identical. As they are sold a lot more it's easy to find them on junkyards around Europe. Here in belgium most of the is-es sold are 220d's ... i hate them as these are pretty crappy engines to be honest :P :P :P

HaerdenC

Hey folks,

welcome back this time with some pictures. The car now has about 210.000 km and as mentioned before one of the rear chocks was leaking and the car started do drive like a boat. As it needs to pass the yearly technical inspection this month I decided to go for it.

Ordered 2 new rear chocks from the Toyota dealership including top bushings and new bolts.
I already had spring tensioners however we noticed that the rear once don't need it you can replace them without if the strut is out there is no tension on it.

So mine has the adaptive drive thing with sports switch, for the chocks this means that there is a small servo engine on top of the struts. Make sure to put the car in NORMAL mode as the new chocks standard are set in normal mode. there is no sensing in the servo.

Pictures because you guys love them :-)


Remove the rear liner, if you don't know how to do this ... please go to a dealership then this manual is not for you :-) It's basicly removing some clups and unbolting 2 rings. The top has some sliders and hooks you can remove without a lot of fuzz.


I'm used to work quit a lot on Toyota's where they seem to make every job harder then needed. For the Lexus it is quit ok actually. There is quite some space besides the hybrid battery. The adaptive sensors you can remove by removing two little metal clips. Please do it slowly and make sure they don't fall ... you can't use a magnet to recover them as they are alu and you don't want to start removing the audio + hybrid stuff to get them. Put the Servo to the side (there is space enough) with the little engine axel upwards ... I'm not sure it it is detachable but I wouldn't take the risk.


Now unbolt the 3 bolts but leave one on halfway in order to be able to unbolt the outside bolts without the strut falling down.

On the outside I don't have a lot of images :-) as I had pretty dirty hands. There are 2 more bolts behind the protective fabric. Just unbolt 2 bolts that hold the fabric and you can reach them you don't need to remove the entire trim. Then unbolt the bolt that holds the strut in the wheel hub and the lowest bolt of the wheel hub.


This is how you will look and how the full strut looks like. From here on it is an easy job like doing it on any other car. Please note that I always use spring tensioners however I noticed that there is no tension on the rear springs I reassembled them without the spring tensioners and it fits perfect. The kit had both the chocks and some new top mount rubber, and a new bolt so used all of this.

Building everything together the other way around and job done in about 3 hours (Next time it will be faster as I don't need to search anymore on how it needs to be done. I did no research whatsoever.)


Here you can see the old ones. One was still ok but the other one was really Fukushima

The drive is totally different now so I suspect that they where already 90 percent done when I bought the car. The drive is a lot better and I feel more of a difference when putting the car in sports modus.

Total costs about 1000 euro everything that breaks is always around 1000 euro on the GS I Learned.

Still love the car with all my hearth. They are not cheap to fix but the drive it totally worth it! Don't forget it is a 350 bhp machine with a massive engine. So I suppose it's the same kind of price when you look at other performance cars.

So what will be the next job on the car?
- New tires (will be done by tire center)
- change the front silent blocks
- change the front chocks maybe

Hope you all enjoy.

HaerdenC

So all folks ... some news. There where not many updates and with good reasons. The car just drives fine and is making miles as expected (or kilometers). It has nearly 140.000 miles now. Just by co-incidence a friend of mine send me a link of a 2012 Lexus GS450h for sale in my area, contacted the garage just to have a talk and had a look at the car on saturday. He offered me a fair amount of money (never drove that cheap if I calculate price by km for my current GS). And a not to bad price for the 2012 one. So chances are big my 3th gen will be replaced by a 4th gen. I more like the 3th gen model however the new one has only 14.000 miles on it. It's a dark gray version and a business edition. Due to the lower CO2 emission it's a lot cheaper to keep driving in Belgium. Also some additional options like USB and DAP are quit nice and the trunk is a lot bigger. So guys ... chances are big you can still follow me and my technical writing on the 4th gen forum department. Hope you enjoyed my pictures on this one :-)

Here some pictures of the new one