Wow, it's been longer than I thought since I started on this. I thought it was about October when I got stuck on the shock tower nuts, but I posted this at the end of July. Amazing how time gets away from you.
Anyway, I have a progress report and update. One of my car buddies and his wife came over for dinner on Saturday. Since I didn't want to destroy either of the shock towers in the process of getting them off the car, I had been using various chemicals to loosen the nuts, including GM Heat Riser penetrant/lube (GM part# 88862627) and oil of wintergreen (which I bought at a GNC health food/vitamin store). I had been using a few drops of the GM penetrant,applying it every other day for about a week, and it was obviously starting to work, because I was getting some residue seeping out of the threads, so something was going on chemically. If that didn't work, the oil of wintergreen was the next step.
While my buddy was here, I showed him what I'd been doing on the Nova, and he said he had a trick for getting the nuts off the bolts. So after dinner, we went out to the shop. I fired up the compressor and got my air impact out of the tool box, along with my BIG screwdriver (we're talking about a screwdriver about 3 feet long with a shank about an inch thick). When I bought it, the tool guy called it a screwdriver, and it does kind of look like a screwdriver, just one that's taken WAY too many steroids. I've always used it as a pry bar, which is what we did with it this time too. Tom stuck the screwdriver through the shock tower and pulled on it, putting sideways pressure on the bolts while I zapped the nuts with the air impact with a 1/2" deep socket on it. It took a few bursts from the impact, but two of the remaining three nuts came off. They were still a little reluctant to let go, but they did come off. The last one unscrewed part way and then refused to budge any further, but by then we could slide the bolt out of the retaining slot with it still attached to the shock tower, which we did. Then we put a vise grip on the base of the bolt and used a box end wrench to unscrew the nut, and it came off.
After we got the nuts off the bolts, I took a look at them. I was still kind of curious about why they had been SO hard to unscrew when neither the bolts or nuts seemed to be rusted. Looking at them closely, I saw that the bolt threads were not quite stripped, but had been deformed, probably from the last time the front shocks had been changed. I'm guessing that the nuts were put on the same way I took them off, namely, with an air impact gun, and it stretched the threads enough to make them REALLY hard to unscrew. So, both problem and mystery solved. This coming weekend, I'm going to pull the front springs and pull the upper and lower control arms and get the mini subframe kit installed. Stay tuned for more reports. I'm taking pictures as this goes along, so I'll probably be posting some here, and I'm planning on writing an article for The 12 Port News when this is all finished, which should be fairly soon now that I can get at the rest of the front suspension.
