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Remove rear suspension
This was the most time consuming job since I have started to work on the car. "rear suspension" on this website includes all parts that are on the back part underneath the car. The leaf spring, both trailing arms, the crossmember, the differential, the half shafts, the read shocks, the sway bar, the strut rods.
Stut Rods
The first part after the leaf spring was the right hand strut rod. This includedthe right hand shock. Both parts came out quite easy. "Ruck zuck" as we say in Germany. The only problem was that I wasn't strong enough to loosen the lower shock mount from of shock. The only thing that helped was a looooooooooooong lever used with the ratched. Have a look, it worked perfectly!
Here the adjustment bolt:
The fun part started when I wanted to remove the bushing of the strut rod eye. "How should I do that?" was my question. The outer part of the bushing was rubber. What to do with rubber? I just burned it and pushed the rest out with the vise. That worked. Later in the project I have bought a 12 ton hydrolic press which would have been usefull I guess. When talking about the half shafts you can see why the press was a good investment. Just as the angle grinder ...
I removed the left one in the same way. When I removed that one I recognized that the strut rod eyes had different sizes. This isn't too unusual as I learned reading the NCRS restoration guide. As of 1975 the strut rod eyes got bigger. So the right hand strut rod must have been replaced at some earlier time. The original one had a 1.2" eye (inner diameter), the bigger one around 1.35". I just hope that the new bushings, ordered at ecklers corvette, will fit!
Yepp, all fitted. Here are parts from Corvette America and Ecklers Corvette
After reworking the strut rods incl. new paint for the strut rods I used my great used-press to install the new bushings
With both bushings installed it looks like this
