mdneilson
LVC Member
I went through the headache of replacing my upper front control arms last weekend. There wasn't any play from the ball joint, but they had a TON of miles on them, so I decided to tackle it while I had some free time. I watched a bunch of YouTube vids and researched the process on here. What I found showed it to be pretty simple, except for extracting the mounting bolts. As anyone who has done it knows, the strut spring is perfectly in the way of the last inch to get that bugger out. I saw many suggestions to just remove the whole strut assembly, which isn't hard but I felt there HAD to be an easier way. Enter my spring compressor! I just put the two ends of my spring compressor together backwards and jacked up underneath the steering knuckle. This made the spring compress, but left a large gap where I had wedged the spring with the compressor tool. Sorry, I'm not great at explaining, so see the attached image. This saved me a ton of time. If you don't have something to use as a safe wedge, you can rent spring compressors at most auto parts stores for free.
