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I spent the weekend putting new struts on the car. This was my first time, and I must have made every possible mistake. I had to do the first one again and again before I finally got it right. But the last one took me 15 minutes start to finish. I thought I'd share what I learned about making it easier.
1. Mark the location of the coil spring in relation to the top hat.
You think you know how the spring and top hat go together, but once it's apart, you'll see that there's more than one way it can fit - but only one way will work right. So draw lines from the top hat to coil springs with liquid paper.
2. Mark the location of the spring to the bottom of the strut mount on the new strut in the same way.
There's only one way these go together - the end of the coil spring has to fit in it's little indentation. But once you get the spring situated in the new strut, go ahead and mark the coil and strut mount locations with lines, too. It will come in handy later.
3. Mark the long side of the bolt triangle.
Stuts come with three bolts, but they are not evenly spaced. They form a triangle on top, and one side is slightly longer, so it can only fit on the vehicle one way. As long as you are marking things, go ahead and mark the long side, so it's easy to keep track of the correct orientation.
4.Why all this marking? When you screw on the retaining nut, the top hat and spring will move.
So you got the thing all lined up, tightened up the retaining nut on top, and gosh darn it, the thing has shifted and now it's together wrong. With your markings lines, it's easy to see this shift when it's happening - before you have got the springs all decompressed. You can either take it slow to try to prevent the shift. Or, even better, position the top hat off a little bit at the start, and then keep tightening until it's in the perfect position. I used an electric impact, and the hammer hits are what shifted it. Don't know if it will shift if tightened by hand, but...
5. Used an impact wrench. How anyone could do this by hand, I don't know. An impact makes it so much easier. I bought a right angle impact driver from Craftsman for about $55. It only has 60ft lbs of torque, but that was plenty of power. It got hot, so I put it in the freezer before I used it. Ahhhhh.
6. Grease the coil spring compactor threads. Seems obvious - the box even says to do it. But the rental set I got from Autozone was filthy. I tried it as it came the first time, and cleaned and greased the threads for the next spring. It was night and day. WD-40 worked fine.
7. Rent two sets of compressors if possible.
Most coil spring compressors come with two that you have to line up 180 degrees from each other. But with two, the coil tends to deform one direction or another which can make putting the top hat back on the strut spindle difficult. After struggling with the first spring, I rented another set of compressors and used three instead of two. Sooo, much easier. Total control with three, so I could get the spring and top hat perfectly aligned. Plus, it was easier to compress the spring. And finally, it seemed a lot safer. Who would use a two-legged stool?
8. How to keep the compressor bolts from jamming against the spring.
Man, was this ever annoying. When you compress the spring, the compressor bolt can gradually move in toward the spring until it's jammed against it. . But for my springs, anyway, there was a pattern. The compressor bolt to the left (put on the compressor anywhere, and rotate as far left as you can) wanted to move away from the spring. The one to the right wanted to move closer to the spring (trouble). So put the one to the right upside down. If you take my advice and used three, the first two go up, and the third one down.
That's it. Hope this saves someone some time and aggravation.
Find a shop that has the commercial grade compressor tool, bring the struts (old and new), and slip the guy a $20 to get it done. Takes 'em all of 10 minutes each, usually.
The coil springs in a vehicle's suspension are often under great tension. Before you can safely install them, care must be taken that the springs are compressed in a way that they do not uncoil and loose energy.
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