Hey guys here is what I can remeber about start to fininsh. It averaged out to about 4 hours with both of us working on it.It was not hard at all just time consuming. The longest part of the whole job was having to comperss and decrompess each spring which puts you in this proccess 16 times! If the springs were allready on the struts this would have been an hour job tops.
Starting in the front
we started in front because of the possibilty of not needed to do the rear due to clearence issue.In my case we installed the rears also).
Step 1.Jack up the car and remove the wheels
Step 2. remove either the top or the bottom stabalizer link bolts to help the lower caontrol arm to drop down out of the way for extra clearence for removing the strut.
Step 3. Remove the strut covers under the hood giving you access to the 4 bolts holding the strut in on the top. Loosen these 4 bolt but not all the way.
Step 4. Go back to the bottom of the strut and remove the big bolt that goes the bottom of the schock.once this is removed you can loosen the 4 top bolts all way and slide the whole thing out. REPEAT THIS FOR BOTH SIDES!
Step 5. Set whichever side you are doing first on the bench. Start mounting up the compressor hardware once on start the proceess of compressing that spring! This is by far the longest and most time consuming part of the spring swap. Hite had a full set of spring compessors. the set has four compressors in it however we got away with using 3 of them. Hite had taken one of the bolts to his job to see if he could find a deep well socket to make the job easier and left the bolt by accident.
Step 6. Once you havge the old spring commpressed(you will know you are ready to remove the strut cap when the spring starts to feel loose between the top and bottom strut mounts) then remove the top bolt pop off the cap and remove the spring. then copmress the eibach and reverse the proccess for spring instalation onto the strut.
Step 7. After the strut is assembled reassemble it all on both sides put the wheels back on and check it out! Lee and I did the fronts first to see hwat the back would look like. In my case with 18's I still had allot of wheel gap so we did those too. Lee only did his fronts with his 19's and it looks great.
Moving on to the rear: The rear was much easier.
Step 1.Remove the wheels.Then remove all of the carpet in the trunk and when the 4 strut bolts are exposed loosen them up but dont take them off yet.
Step 2.Go underneath and remove the large bolt holding the bottom of the strut in the control arm.
Step 3. Once the bolt is out remove the 4 bolts in the trunk and then procceed to finagle the stru out of the bottom.Note you do not have to loosen a side of the endlinks in the rear.
Step 4. now just compress the spring remove the cap compress the new spring and put it back together. The rear springs compressed much faster than the fronts.
Step 5. After the rear struts are reasembled with new springs put them back into the car in in the reverse order of removel.
Step 6. now that the shocks are back in and you have put the wheels back on and dropped it down. Stand back and enjoy
I have to say I am in love with my LS all over agian. The way it looks and feels driving it is awesome. I hope this helps someone else out.
Here is a link to all of the pics I have taken. Itook them high res and cant get them to load to save a life lol.
http://s1304.beta.photobucket.com/user/reaper766/library/
