For future reference, it’s good to give a thread a proper closing. It is possible for a relative novice to pull off a job like this. Funny how an epic battle ends with a whimper. During the initial stages, I was using a huge breaker bar, reciprocating saw, and impact tools to take parts off the vehicle. During installation, it was nice to use a more civilized torque wrench as the primary tool. And at the very end, it’s a tiny 8 mm wrench for bleeding brakes and fingers to re-attach wheel arch clips.
Got the vehicle back from alignment, and it feels great. Every single control arm, all rear hub bushes, all arb bushes, all drop links, all steering/panhard rods, all replaced. Throw in new brake lines and fluid, diff fluids, xfer fluid, some EAS rear valve and rear air-strut swap-outs (from a friend who recently converted to coils), and it’s a lot of r&r.
I won't attempt to repeat the many how-to's available via a google search, but the one piece of advice I’d give is to be prepared for the things that go wrong. Everybody warns about the seized control arm bolts, so it’s not discouraging to find those and have to saw them off. And it's kind of fun when friends come over and say "I don't think I've ever seen anybody use a reciprocating saw to work on their car." Here are some unexpected things that set me back.
Hub nut that wouldn’t come loose, as described previously. I ended up buying a ¾-in breaker, and that did the job (in combination with a 5-ft cheater extension).
Brake line flare that wouldn’t loosen/tighten. One of the flares on the metal line must have been tightened too much such that the flare wouldn’t release from the female-end flexi line. I finally muscled it out, but then when re-assembling, the mishapen flare wouldn’t insert to allow me to screw the lines together. I ended up filing the flare to fit, but the whole thing added time while I was considering whether to get a new metal line or if I could revive the existing. (No leaks from my re-formed line.)
Missing bump stops on one of the control arms. One of my brand new rear control bushings was missing the little white rubber bump stops. There is conflicting info about whether these are necessary or being phased out, but the supplier was good to send me the missing pieces. The incident did set me back in terms of schedule.
Front upper control arm. I couldn’t find much in terms of a how-to for the front UCA’s. These are a challenge due to the forward-most bolts, which are entirely hidden and hard to get at. But after doing all the other control arms, there wasn’t much different.
Front arb bushings. The left-side upper bolt for the arb bush collar is inaccessible. Well, I saw a forum post from one lucky person who had a ⅜ drive socket that fit next to the front diff arm. I tried 5 different ⅜-drive sockets. None fit. I read somebody who used a grinder to shave off the driver end of his socket to make it fit. Instead of this, I ended up following the other, surefire solution of removing a frame piece, removing the bolts that attach the front diff to the support arm (support the diff), and then wedging the arm aside by a few mm in order to get a socket on a single nut for the arb bush. Three nuts were removed in 5 min, and I was thinking that this would be a quick part of the job. Then that last stubborn one ends up taking a couple hours to remove one single stupid nut.
Drive shaft hyperextended and came loose at front inner CVJ housing. I read warnings about being careful with the drive shaft to avoid pulling it out, so tried to keep them supported. I got the first 3 re-inserted into the hubs with no problems. I don’t know if I was overconfident that this was an overblown concern or just lucky on the first 3, but on the last one, as I was muscling the drive shaft in, I pulled it out too far:
So I had to research front CVJ / driveshaft installation. Nothing was broken - bearings and boot were fine. But I did have to remove the boot and re-align the bearings to re-insert them into the housing. Some grease is lost, so I needed to clean the bearings and housing and inner boot, repack with grease, and re-install. Similar to the other “gotcha’s,” the time to actually do the work wasn’t that much, but it did take some time to figure out exactly what was wrong and how to address the challenge. But it was interesting to see how that CVJ is put together.
That’s about it. Big job, but it feels and sounds much better - no more squeaks and groans going over speed bumps. I’m in it for the long haul with this vehicle! Took a weekend trip to southern Utah, Lake Powell area last weekend, and the vehicle ran great (except for wheel balance issues caused by impacted clay, but once cleaned out it was fine again).
Now what to do with this?
