Rear struts replaced
Now that the shocks have arrived form the states, we can get started on the rear end. Firstly, we removed the half-shafts and then the hand brake cable. Then, we started working on the strut tower on the driver side first.
I had wanted to take the strut tower completely off the car, but after trying to separate the strut tower and the wish bone, I gave up on that idea. The aim of the work we were doing was to simply change the shocker inserts. Since this was the only thing that we really needed to do, we tried to simply undo the strut tower from the car and lower it with a jack. This worked a treat and we could finally do what we wanted to do.
We compressed the springs and removed the top caps and then the springs. The next tough part was getting the old shockers out. Using a large wrench and a long tube (to increase the amount of torque that we could apply), the gland nut just didn’t feel like budging. Working at it a little more, it finally gave a little and we knew that we were close. We finally got it off and the old cartridge out. We then put the new cartridge in. We did the same on the other side, but this time without wasting time trying to get the wishbone separated from the strut tower ;).
With the shockers replaced, I went about cleaning the components under the car. Even though we had washed under the car several times, there was still plenty of dirt on most of the components under there, especially the ones facing the underside of the car. I was able to wash the passenger side, but ran out of time before being able to do the driver side.
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- View of the lowered strut
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- Close up view of the lowered strut