I looked on Clark's Garage (my Haynes and shop manual are in the car), and it seems pretty straightforward: jack up car, loosen lower shock bolt, jack up trailing arm, remove lower shock bolt, remove upper shock bolt, replace shock.

That's about it, yeah? Any tips or tricks to be aware of?

 

Have a breaker bar or impact wrench handy for the lower bolt.

 

Just did mine a few weeks back. I have been wanting an air compressor for a while and took the opportunity to finally buy one along with an impact wrench.

With the right tools it was cake. Took 2 hours total for both sides including scrubbing the wheel wells clean.

 

Cool. I recently bought a cordless drill that's also an impact wrench ... used it today to build some shelving. It's got powah!

 

Look for rust on the upper bolts and spray them with penetrating oil before you start on the lowers. It's about impossible to get a closed end wrench on the upper nut so you end up having to turn the bolt. It's easier if it's not rusted in place.
Cheers
Randy

 

I used a breaker bar on both the upper and lower, mine had never been touched before and everything came apart easy..g/l

 

That's a good idea ... the uppers look pretty damn rusty. Frighteningly so. Which is strange because overall the car has almost no rust.

 

IIRC the shock “locks out” trailing arm travel when the rear is suspended in the air. Thus, there is still significant shear force applied to the shock bolts. Assuming the car is safely supported on stands, I found that using a floor jack to move the trailing arm up an inch or so from the locked-out, full extension made it much easier to remove those bolts.

Every car may be a little different in terms of amount of torque needed to break the bolts, however, I found that a 350 ft-lb air impact could not budge my lower shock bolts at first. Then, I jacked up the trailing arm the next morning and used a 16” ratchet handle (my air tank was empty) and both bolts broke pretty easily. YMMV of course.

 

Buy some engine degreaser that is safe for paint ( maybe Black Magic) and spray off the fender wells. Makes it alot nicer to do.

 

Allan is right on. I used the impact wrench with the wheels fully suspended but in order to get the bolts out a jack under the trailing arm with just a touch of lift makes it easy to slide the bolts right out.