front a-arm bolt tip

[treed2@u.washington.edu (T. Reed)]

Just thought of this while I was skimming through list messages..

I've always hated taking off the bolt through the front of the control
arms because every time I do it (such as to install or remove my lower
stress bar) the arm always shifts when I remove the bolt and then it takes
6 hours to re-install the bolt because I have to jiggle, jack, lower,
twist, try installing bolt, jack again, etc. until I get it catches the
threads and starts going in. Every time of course I risk screwing it up
and having to have a new nut welded inside the unibody.

When I was doing my engine swap I had to take off the lower bar because I
decided to drop the engine out the bottom and it was definitely in the
way.

This time I tried something different..

With the car on the ground, jack up the driver side of the car to ~6"
clearance between the driver side wheel and the ground. Crawl under car
and remove passenger side a-arm bolt. Install or remove stress bar. Then
re-install bolt.

Lower the car again and jack up the passenger side. Crawl under the car
and remove the driver side a-arm bolt. Install or remove stress bar on
-that- side. Re-install bolt, lower car and torque both bolts.

I did this twice and each time it went without a hitch. I don't really
know how I came up with this method but it worked well for me and I
figured there's got to be somebody out there who has spent 6 hours trying
to get the bolt lined up with the nut again (say, after installing poly
control arm bushings) who would find this trick useful.

-Toby