coltj

Apology accepted; I'm not a dentist and don't even play one on TV. Pick was something in the tool chest. Took the photo with my camcorder w/ 10x optical zoom. I was desperate as it was 9:30pm and I was working in my driveway.

I tried to find my old shock with the clip, but no luck. IIRC, I would add the following to Damon's instructions in red.

Grab the loop at the end of the wire pin clip (shown here hidden on the other side of the rod-end) with something (dental pick, pin-punch, long thin screwdriver, whatever) and pull it away from the groove (red arrow), unclipping it from the groove, thereby rotating (the tiny yellow arrow) the wire pin clip on the axis through the holes in the rod-end, rotating it as far as it will go (90 to 180 degrees?) and that should be enough to let you pull the rod-end off the ball mount. After you pull the clip away from the groove and rotate it a bit, as Damon explains, you have to pull back on the clip, in the same direction as the axis of the shock, so that the straight, dotted line in Damon's last picture is pulled back about half of its length. That will free the ball mount. You don't have to remove it completely I would have annotated a picture to explain this better, but all my efforts were unworthy of a Rennlist post.

Hope this helps.

Jeffrey

P.S. Since when are you afraid of a little snow Nile? Do I recall correctly seeing a picture of your car buried(literally) in snow in the North End a few years ago?

nile13

Yep, it was my car looking like a snowed in UFO, though it was in Framingham in 2004 when I bought it.

It all melted today... I have to do something about my battery as it's completely flat. I'm also sure that we'll get another couple of feet of the white stuff before the end of March, so I'm not in a hurry. Driving my Miata on coilovers and winter tires the few times a week I actually have to go somewhere. Life in a city (even if it's Cambridge) has it's pluses

DamonsCarrera

Cambridge?!? I might be going to MIT next year... If you don't get your hood struts done before then, I can give you a hand!