Removing trailing arm without breaching brake system?

[content22207]

Put a floor jack underneath the wrench.

Bill Robertson
#5939

[dhaney]

My most promising idea for breaking it loose is as follows- after soaking the thing in a good penetrant for several days, remove the shims. This will likely involve using the angle grinder in one of them, but once one is out the rest should be easy to remove. (I've already got new shims ordered, as I'd need to do this if I sawzall the bolt anyway). Remove the nut from the TAB (it comes off easily enough). Hit the bolt with Freeze Off on both sides of the arm. Place a number of washers on the TAB, and replace the nut- and then tighten the nut. With some luck, this will break the bolt free so it can be removed...

Or...

Once you get the shims out use a saber saw (jig saw) to cut the bolt in half. Then you don't need to worry about the frozen nut.

It can be done if you are careful without harming the arm.

Dan

[content22207]

Nut isn't frozen (that's why I suggested a pickle fork) -- the TAB itself is frozen to the sleeve.

Bill Robertson
#5939

[dhaney]

Nut isn't frozen (that's why I suggested a pickle fork) -- the TAB itself is frozen to the sleeve.

Bill Robertson
#5939

So it is the same problem we had. In our case there was no way to unfreeze the bolt from the arm without removing it from the car. It was truly cold welded solid.

We spent many hours with lubricants, a chisel, heat and eveything we could think of. What finally worked was drilling the bolt out starting with a pilot hole down the middle and then incrementally increasing the bit size (the bolt is hardened and even with lubricants it was chewing up bits) hoping it would eventally unlock from the arm.

It never happened and, like I said before, we finally used a bit that was the exact same size as the bolt which meant we essentally reamed out the control arm sleeve enough to put the new bolt through.

Dan

[Ashyukun]

I'm hoping that mine isn't quite that bad, but there won't be any way to tell until I get into it again and try and break it loose...

[Ashyukun]

A final update on this- I finally got into it with the TAB this afternoon, and after cutting through about 1/8 of the bolt with a cutoff wheel on my angle grinder, I was able to get the bolt to turn and back it out all the way without having to cut all the way through it and remove the trailing arm. I did a happy little dance around the garage holding the removed bolt. It was definitely bent, though not drastically, but also very heavily rusted.

I put in the new TAB bushing, but can't fully install the new TAB until the package I have coming in from Midwest gets here since I did destroy the shims as I expected would be the case. Still- that's a very minor delay. Not having to pull the trailing arm makes me QUITE happy... especially since I've got enough other issues to deal with already. -_-;

[John U]

My left side TAB bolt was slightly bent and would not come out no matter what I did! (5spd)
Eventually all my prying, twisting and cursing resulted in the rubber bushing getting destroyed....came out easy after that! Just had to replace the bushing, but I should have done it from the start anyway.

John