Theory you can live by
A proper-sized 6-sided closed wrench, a can of penetrating lubricant, and a healthy dose of soak-time can solve most ‘old car’ problems. Having the right tools and spending time to prepare will always save time in the long run. Nearly any bolt that’s stuck can be wrenched free and replaced, no matter how bad the corrosion has become. I expected all the bolts that hold the front suspension to be stuck, seized, or otherwise problematic. I let all the nuts on top of the strut towers soak in penetrating lubricant overnight, and came back in the morning.
The problem
My car presented me with a completely new problem. All the nuts spun freely, but only some of them came off. The top of the bolt sticks up through the strut tower with a nut on top, but the bottom is implanted inside a rubber cushion on top of the suspension’s coil spring. Without removing those nuts, there is no way to remove the spring. A few minutes later, the tired old Sears compressor was firing on all… cylinder, filling its tank. On the end of its air hose, the die grinder spun up to life, and chewed away a chunk of the bolt and nut. At this point, I was still hoping to separate the bolt and nut.
Standard method of removing a bolt
Most mechanics know that to remove a nut from a bolt that spins freely, you just have to attach a wrench to the end of the bolt and hold it in place while the nut is twisted free. Because of the rubber stop, I couldn’t get at the other end of the bolt to hold it in place, so I cut a slot to wedge a screwdriver into the bolt and hold it in place while turning the nut with a wrench. The next few hours turned out to be less than 10 minutes, and I was left with a pair of broken screwdrivers and frustration boiling up inside me. There’s no way I’ll let a simple nut prove to be more persistent than I am.
Modified method of removing a (modified) bolt
The compressor and die grinder went back into full service, and I split both down the middle. If you wrap a rubber band around a roll of paper, it will stay in place and keep the paper rolled up. If you cut that rubber band, it no longer has enough force to stay in place and the paper unrolls. If I cut the nut, I’d be able to simply pull the two halves of the nut apart and free the bolt between the two halves.
Small gains are big rewards by themselves
Although this doesn’t seem like a lot of work, it did take an hour just to remove that one bolt, and I haven’t even gotten to the bottom half of the suspension yet. Old cars can have hundreds of small issues like this, causing restoration and modernization efforts to take weeks longer than they were meant to. The only way to get through it is dedication and making sure that every moment spent leads to a result. Every step I take, and every turn of the wrench has a point and I know that in the not-too-distant future I’ll get to drive this car. I’m one step closer to that end goal, with my new springs installed on the front and replaced shock bumpers on top of them (with new nuts on the tops of the shock towers).
That’s what continues to drive me every day.
