Strut Installation Notes

Rear right strut was completely blown and required replacement. During test drives, when driving over bumps the strut would knock and either not engage at all and not compress or would compress completely and wouldn't decompress.

Installation of the strut has been dragged on by my inexperience in car mechanics as well as unforeseen occurrences.

Removing the struts was pretty straight forward, getting the strut bolts out required a bit of engineering by jacking up the strut on a 14mm bolt through the hole that is in the control arm leading to the strut assembly. The difficulty removing the strut was probably much lower than putting it back in. I didn't have the tool to remove the trunk clips holding the cloth liner and a flathead screwdriver and pliers were used leading a few damaged during removal.

The spring compression tool I am using is known as "The Widow Maker" which was somewhat concerning but I doubled up on them to increase redundancy in compression. The first few times compressing I used 4 compressors and a ratchet. Later on for time sake I started using 3 in a triangle pattern and the impact.

The first time I exchanged the spring to the new strut assembly, the blown bump stops were discovered, the new struts were discovered to be longer than the old struts (to be further discussed), and the alignment of the strut has to be exact to fit back into the control arm properly.

Re-assembly actually was not that hard with use of a jack to lift and maneuver the control arm to align with stabilizer bar, strut, and knuckle.

All that's left is final torque on 6 bolts and trunk.

To achieve 118 lb/f of torque on the loaded car with my torque wrench was near impossible at my strength level on the right side of the car.

Torqued to a satisfactory amount with the shorter ratchet with better torque ergonomics. Rides well.