March 11, 2006 - Part 2 of Tackling the Rear Suspension (2)
We were ready to dig into the driver side rear suspension and felt
that we knew what to do from our experiences with the passenger
side. The brakes came off without a problem and luckily the
brake pad bracket wasn't seized on this side. After we set the
brakes aside we tried to get the control arm bolt out. Even
though we knew what to do, doing it was still a challenge. We
slammed a sledge into that bolt as hard as we could but it wouldn't
budge. We tried different jack heights but still had problems.
Finally by some stroke of luck we got the alignment right and the
bolt started to inch out. It took some force though, much more
than we used on the other side, but the bolt came out. We
cleaned the rust out of the control arm and then installed the new
shock. Again, the bracket was a little too small for the shock
bushing. We bent the bracket some, greased the bushing and
used a hammer (again) to massage the shock into place. I
crawled out from under the car and put the nut on the top of the
shock using the same process as the passenger side, I turned it a
couple of revolutions. Just enough to keep it on but not tight
enough to put pressure on the top bushings. I'd tighten it
when the car was on the ground.
We knew what needed to be done to get the control arm back into
place. We put the new spring and isolators onto the control
arm perch, jacked up the axle housing, and put a jack under the
control arm. As we starting raising it we knew we had the
process down because the holes were much closer than they were when
we first started the other side. We used that big screw driver
again to line things up and slipped the bolt through. Here's a
picture of the driver side suspension installed.
As we were finishing the suspension install we noticed that the quad shock
looked like it had seen better days so we decided that we'd buy a
new one for each side and install them the following weekend.
Before we called it a day we put the driver side rear brakes back on
with new cheapo pads from NAPA. Here's a picture of the tools
we used to do the suspension removal and install followed by a
picture of the trunk before we put all of the carpeting back in:
