This weekend i plan on putting on my new shocks and springs. I have a spring compressor and the mazda workshop manuel. Do you guys have any advice that you could give me or any problems that some of you might have had when installing springs and or shocks. Thanks.

 

It's really quite simple, I just did mine 2 weeks ago. The hardest part for me was having to undo the spring compressors and reposition them several times, but nothing difficult at all. Without an impact wrench, it would take a lot longer.



As j9fd3s said, the front shocks aren't centered at the top, where they mount to the car. You want the top of the shock to be more inward and rearward. (I think it's a difference of 1/4" from the sides of the square mount thingy, I had to break out the tape measure) I think this differed from the stock setup, so the little mark the book tells you to use doesn't work for this.

his words:

 

yeah its actually very easy. if you have air tools just pull the struts off as assemblies and you can zap it all apart on the bench/floor.



the only "trick" besides what baldy mentioned is just to keep the strut top (particularly the rear) in the right order.

 

I did mine about 3 or 4 months ago and I have never done it before that. it was pretty easy.



I did one at a time so I had the other side as reference. The hardest part for me was removing the top big bolt to remove the rear struts from the caps or whatever they are called. The Haynes manual said to wedge a pry bar between the mounting bolts to keep things from turning. That only works on the front ones when there are four upper mounting bolts. On the rear there are only two and I could not get anything to keep the strut from turning. I ended up cutting the bolt off since I had new ones with the new struts.



Otherwise it was easy. Everything came off easy and unscrewed and unbolted easily.



Good luck. With me, it took 4 hours but that included an oil change.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot about that part. To get it off I used the impact wrench, but torquing it down was the tough part. I ended up using my pole (steel rod once used to hold up a ceiling fan). I wedged the pole between to studs, right in the middle of the pole, sat on the pole with the bolt between my legs, and torqued it down. Though of the socket slipped off, I might have been hurting pretty bad (wham, right in the crotch!).

 

4 hours huh. That sounds good to me. Thanks for the advice guys.