Coil Overs

My brother's struct spring compressor has been following me from house to house, garage to garage for over 20 years. He first bought it to spruce up the suspension in a pair of '79 Lancia Betas he owned in the late 80s...OK, 30 years. I owned a 1996 Acura Integra and never did work on the suspension in the 10 years I owned it. Now its been sold for 10 years, and I own a 1999 Miata. It was time.

I've surfed the web a bit and knew of a performance shop in Grand Junction, Colorado, that specializes in Miatas. Flyin Miata is located among the vineyards in Palisade, a town just to the East. I agonized for a few weeks about wether to get the more street oriented Konis, or the more track oriented V-Maxx coilovers. I went all-in and got the coilovers. There are much more aggressive springs available, but I liked the idea of adjustable height, and being better prepare for a day among the cones at an auto-cross event.

Besides tightening the suspension and making the car fly around corners better, it will sit lower to the ground, so here's a "before" picture.

Keith Tanner at Flyin' Miata has a book full of instructions, so I bought it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0760316201/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The first step to installing these involves removing bolts that hold the top end of the assembly to the car. You can see these from inside the engine compartment. They are on either side of  that shiny thing in the bottom center of the photo below.

Things got interesting as the nuts were taking more turns than it seems they should to come off.

Look closely. That nut, obviously, came off, but it barely has any threads! Two others came off as they should. The fourth (2 on the left, and two on the right) is still on the car and partially dremeled off (more to come) because the threads were so stripped away they weren't there to do their job.

Above is a picture of the shock mount stud that might have come from. Look at the threads closest to the (red) body. Lovely eh?

Nothing a bit of dremeling wouldn't fix.

With that stuff loose, it's time to loosen the bottom and remove the assembly of the side I can progress on. This picture is from the driver's side. It has the stripped bolt. Other pictures are of the passenger side where I could make progress.

The assembly I'm talking about is the strut that connects the wheel hub behind the brake disk to the top of the fender. It's the thing with a spring around it. Below the spring you can see a big steel letter A pointed at you. That's the upper control arm and plays a role in the story. The challenge here is that even with the car up on jack stands, the spring is still pushing the wheel/hub downwards. In any case, the whole affair is a little to long to just lift out once a bolt at the bottom is removed. More parts need disassembled.

Up top from inside the fender you can see some looseness.

Looking at the hub from the side, you an see where a bolt holding stuff together at the bottom has been removed.

Looking more closely at the 'A', the upper control arm, mostly black here, there is a bolt that holds the legs of the 'A' to the car. If we remove it, the whole affair comes apart as desired, "simply" in the words of Tanner. The bolt can be seen at the top of the picture, nut on the left, bolt head on the right. There's a tube behind the spring that is part of the frame of the car.

I went out and bought the two 21mm wrenches that were required, yet missing from my tool box. The nut was on tight enough that I made use of my new rubber hammer and got it loose. I kept turning to get this long bolt out of position. I eventually ran into an issue:

There's a bracket that holds parts that hold the sway bar in place. A bolt doing that job was in the way of getting this beast out.

Ignore the smaller, bolt above the middle with threads showing. Follow the bigger one from a black bushing on the left to a grimy, red-edged bracket on the right. There's a bolt head on the bottom. What you don't see is the length of that smaller bolt preventing progress on the big one. I loosened it, bringing the bolt's length down out of the way and got the big out out.

Here's a better picture:

And then when it's all in pieces:

The strut has some parts that will be used to put the new coilovers on, so we need to dissassemble that. This is the "assembly" I referred to above. Here's it's showed with the strut-spring compressor, the tool that's been following me for decades. The compressor has been tightened to compress the spring so it all can be taken apart.

Then in pieces...

Next up, putting this side back together, dremeling the remaining bolt on the other side and getting it done. Then the rear.