Thursday, May 6, 2010

Installing front coil spring

This was one hell of a job. I'm never ever going to do this again. Compressing the spring, and lining up everything so that it goes back into the wishbone is a very painfully slow and iterative process. I must have compressed and uncompressed the spring at least 5 times in order to figure out the exact position to fit the spring compressor's arms so to not cause damage to the spring torrent yet provide enough compression at the same time. Without power tools refitting the front springs can easily take a full 8 hours.

Unlike the removal process whereby I used consecutively longer bolts while dropping the spring pan, I had to use a proper threaded rod for the installation. There is just no other way to line up the spring to the wishbone otherwise.

I screwed in 4 pieces of threaded rod, each 1ft in length into the wishbone. Then slid the spring and pan assembly into the threaded rod guides and tightened it up until the pan and wishbone made contact. Then I removed a rod at a time and replaced it with a bolt.








The original setup had 1 packing piece at the bottom and 2 at the top of the spring. In order to avoid blocking the drain hole at the bottom of the spring pan I decided to put all 3 pieces at the top of the spring. I taped the packing pieces to the spring so it wouldn't slip off while I fit the spring. Hopefully I haven't introduced any squeaks by having the spring in direct contact with the spring pan.

May God bless anyone who has to do this.

No comments: