Front Suspension Progress

[Guest 50Plymouth]

Okay, I did remove the outer pivot bolt and the control arm dropped, but not enough to get the spring out.

Prying or spring compressing should not be necessary to remove it right?

[58prostreet]

Ryan

If u have car high enuf, u should be able to push lower control down far enuf to get spring out. It should rotate down and back torwards center of frame and pull spring out of bottom.

Bob

[BobT-47P15]

Pat.....looking good. Glad to see you are making headway.

[PatS....]

Okay, I did remove the outer pivot bolt and the control arm dropped, but not enough to get the spring out.

Prying or spring compressing should not be necessary to remove it right?

You could now remove the inner 4 nuts and bolts holding the lower "A" frame on, replace the coil and reverse the procedure. Double check to ensure there is no pressure on that spring and be sure it's tied!!!!!!!!

[Guest 50Plymouth]

You could now remove the inner 4 nuts and bolts holding the lower "A" frame on, replace the coil and reverse the procedure. Double check to ensure there is no pressure on that spring and be sure it's tied!!!!!!!!

Thanks, I got the coil out. But now I'm stuck awaiting your wonderful advise. Concerning reassembly my understanding from the manual and reverse order is that I first reconnect the 4 bolts on the pivot bar right? I did that, but I can't for the life of me get the narrow control arm end to line up with the steering knuckle. Gave up after 2 hours.

Also, the manual never mentioned the front suspension bar that fits into the front edge of the lower control arm (sway?). Thats a bugger to get back in place. The moral of the story for me is I'm not touching suspension work myself on another car soon. I just want this one back together!

[Normspeed]

Sorta came back on this thread late. I dropped the sway bar first, left it attached to the control arms but unbolted the bushing retainers and let it drop down. (That removes a lot of resistance when you lower the arm to get the old spring out.) Then like Bob and Pat say, remove the lower pivot bushing. On mine it has a lock nut on one end, remove that then just back out the threaded bushing with a socket. Lower the jack, may need to push or pry down on the lower arm a bit to get the spring out. Then put in the new spring, make sure it's rotated to fit in the little spring pocket in the bottom arm, raise the arm with the jack and thread the pivot bushing back in with the grease seals in place. A putty knife helps keep the grease seals in until the bushing is in place. If you can't line up the threaded bushing, try not only raising/lowering your jack a little, but moving the kingpin support in and out. Should line up easy.

[PatS....]

I have my stabilizer bar out. The procedure in the manual actually has the 4 bolts on the inner bushing bar as the final assembly method. I only just got my spring silencers so have not done the final assembly yet.

If you have the for bolts in the lower inner bushing bar, the outer pivot pin should go in as Norm described.

Don't fight the stabilizer bar as well at this point, just remove it and replace it after the rest is done.

[Normspeed]

Pat, your front suspension is so clean I want to kick some mud on it just to ugly it up! At first glance I thought you were using a block of ice as a support block then I looked closer and I see it's a white rag. probably one of those Canadian sterotype things..

[PatS....]

Norm, that pic is NOT mine...it's from the R&C article linked at the bottom of the post.

Mine is, at present, almost as clean. I have yet to do the final reassembly so it may get banged up a bit

THIS one is mine:

It will be getting muddy, but not this year by the looks of things

[Normspeed]

Pat, you do nice work.

[PatS....]

Thanks Norm.