With the rear suspension covered, and new shocks on their way, I started working on the front suspension. I have never liked bolt-bolt design shocks (or should I call them stud-stud design shocks?). The drama on the front suspension disassembly started with the shocks. Top bolt, impossible to grip them on that ridiculous 10mm (maybe less?) flatten part of the bolt to unscrew the mega-frozen nut. I ended up winding some tie-down straps several rounds around the shock upper part (dust cover) until it locked and I could then only focus on the nut. Bottom bolt had a better sized grip thing, maybe 15mm or 17mm, where the bolt is welded to the shock body, but then, it is like 1/3 of the width of a common open end wrench. No way to fit a regular wrench there to hold it. Since the shocks were destined to the recycle bin anyway, I used vice-grips to hold the shock body while I was working on the nut. One of them was so frozen, the stud broke.
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In one of the sides, I found this "rattlesnake" there. You can imagine how that added to the already super rattling panels noise I was experiencing when driving.
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This time I decided to take it all apart instead of the two step approach used on the rear suspension links. No dramas to remove the front radius arms other then loosing one of the cross-member bolts to allow for some room to wrench on the mushroom bushing nut.
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Radius arms bushes were cracked.
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I can't come up with a good reason for the Nissan engineers to suit the upper coil buckets with a cover plate... My buckets were so packed with dirt, that it was full to the top. Had to excavate that to be able to reach the upper suspension bump stop nut, and of-course it was pretty frozen. Used an wire-brush attachment to a cordless drill to clean the nut and the last bolt threads and then soak it in penetrating oil to be able to remove the bump stop. All that dust with all that oil, you can imagine the mess.
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The coil spacer/cushioning thing was completely disintegrating. I measured what seemed to be the original width at a non-compressed part of the rubber and it had 10mm. I decided to have a 30mm coil spacer made to replace the OEM rubber one, with 10mm to account for the disintegrated rubber and 20mm to account for an eventual sagging on the original coils after 20+ years and 280k km on the clock (with no way to figure out if that was true).
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Took the old rubber, front and rear coils to the machinist for him to turn me new front/rear coil spacers. For the rear ones, since there was no previous rubber spacer/cushioning, I had to provide him with some more measurements.
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Rear coil springs have the last loop flat, while the front coil springs don't, so he made me different front and rear spacers to suit. They turned out very cool in my opinion.
Rear spacers:
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Front spacers:
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Then these babies arrived!
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And not so long after, these ones arrived!
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Front radius arms, panhard bar and new shocks all went in in a single night after work, and then on the following night, replaced the rear shocks. Suspension is all buttoned up and the car drives like a train on tracks now!
Let me approach the subject of wheels and tires on another post, and then I show you how the car instance is now. It is looking amazing.
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