,
Next, dig through your drawer of Clarkson and grab your favorite sledge hammer. While the service manual will say “gently tap a few times with a hammer,” reality says you will beat the ever loving piss out of your suspension. An air hammer would be very helpful here, but some penetrating fluid between the upright and strut is mandatory. It would probably be a good idea to strap the top of the upright to the lower control arm so it doesn’t flop around too much when the strut finally comes free (you need to be sure it doesn't drop backwards, as that can tear the brake line). This would be a good idea, so I didn’t do that, instead catching the upright when it came free.
Finally, loosen the three bolts from the shock tower. Boom, rust assembly in hand. Note that in the front, Mazda used actual bolts in the top mounts and not weld studs, so yoiu can actually replace these if they break. No, I'm not bitter about spending a few hundred dollars and losing my car for a week to get that fixed…
Before we take apart our strut assembly, we’ll finish removing the sway bar end link. Between the axle, tie-rod, fender well, and lower arm, there’s not a lot of tool room. If you’re planning to replace these like we were, you can use a bit of anger to break end link’s ball and socket joint, grab the ball with a set of vice grips, and then run the nut off with the impact gun. Plan on replacing them, our hexes rusted so badly that they just stripped out when we tried to loosen them. These will have to come out, as the top end has to go in before the strut is installed. While you can try and juggle the orientation of the strut, control arm, and sway bar, removing the bottom end simply makes it a lot easier to put it all back together later.
After making merry with the spring compressor, the top mount comes free and we can lay our strut bare.
Groosssssssss…even though internally these struts are functional, they are so rusty they are no longer repairable. This seems very anomalous, as these struts are only 6 years old…surely they shouldn’t be THIS rusty? Shoot, the KYBs I yanked from my S13 were in better shape and twice as old. Hopefully the poor paint quality is due to the fact that these were prototypes and not conducive to Koni’s mass production quality.
5 comments
What size tires did you use? Were you able to fit 245s under it?
For Street Class SCCA, you have to run the factory tire width, so we were limited to 225s.
No, that is not the rule for SCCA Street class.
No, that is not true. You can use any size tire you want, that fits on a factory width wheel and fits under the car without any modifications. You can also alter the wheel diameter up/down an inch and alter offset by 7mm.
My real question is, will 245s fit under the fenders without rubbing?
You’re right, I grabbed the rules for wheels, not tires when I wrote this article.
I wish I could help you here, but I sold the 3 years ago and never attempted to fit anything wider than a 225 under it. Sorry.