Mid-drop observations

[Nova_Cobra64]

I am in the middle of a drop on my 69. I was under the impression that changing the front springs was supposed to be the difficult part. IMO, they were a piece of cake. I opted to go the route that required splitting the LCA ball joint. First one took me a little over an hour to do, which was not bad concidering I was just figuring out how to do it. Second one was in an out in half an hour. Overall I was very happy with how it went, concidering the service advisor at work said book time is over an hour per side.

Now for the back part, In theroy it should have been just as easy as the front, if not a little easier. Well, that is in a perfect world, and unless your truck has undergone a spring change or frame off resto in the last 15 years, then your truck is probably from the same imperfect world as mine. I started the rear coils Saturday afternoon and the truck is still on stands. The highlights:

-RL shock took about 20 minutes to get off. RR shock would not come off after 35 minutes of struggling with it. So I decided to leave it and see if it could be done with the shock still on, and it in fact can, so that was 55 minutes down the drain

-Top spring retainer bolts damn near siezed. Total time invested was around half an hour. They untreaded to about the last 1/2" before they decided to break instead.

-Get to the bottom spring retainer bolts and waddaya know, they have made contact with something hard at some point in their life and are worn to the point on almost being round at the front. Tried a socket and that was a no go. Too poor for a torch, an angle grinder, a sawzall or apparently a good hacksaw blade . So after spending an hour last night with every hacksaw blade and chisel we owned, I gave up and figured I would wait and pick up a new hacksaw blade today. So I got the blade today and spent another 20 minutes sawing the bolts off. Sigh of relief? Not so lucky.......now the washers won't come off. 10 minutes with a chisle and off they come. Can you guess what is next? If you guessed that the bolts going through the trailing arms were rusted enough to be a pain in the ass, pat yourself on the back. Used chisels under the spring to try bringing the bolt up. Worked not too bad on the drivers side, came out in about 10 minutes. Passenger side would only budge about an inch. After giving up on that method I enlisted the help of the hacksaw once again. Chopped the bolt off above the trailing arm and used a punch to punch it through the bottom. Approimate time wasted on these two bloody bolts, probably around 3 hours.

I am going to dig out some bolts tomorrow at work and hopefully have everything back together tomorrow.

[Tx Firefighter]

I can't imagine what kind of rust you northerners must deal with. I hear a lot of horror stories like this.

Southern guys can spray any bolt with penetrant, and the next day, it will almost always screw right out.

Think of how sweet it's going to feel when you get done and it looks good though.