Greetings!
Now that Spring is settling in, it is time to get back to working on the cars. Sadly, this is not a beetle post. We had a pressing issue with the front suspension on the family Kia. You could say our Soul was wobbly/Noisy when driving on bumpy roads. Who would have thought that this could be fixed with around $85 and a little elbow grease.
Well, I assumed that this would be an easier job than it was.
After all, you can see in the picture that there are only 2 connections on each part. FYI, these do not come with replacement nuts, so plan ahead. I did not. It added time to the job. Me and the budding mechanic went out and jacked up the car. We then stabilized it with chocks and went right to work. She is growing in her skills and I did not need to coach at all.
Things seemed to be going well.
Then it came time to remove the top nut. Work, work, work. Lots of movement was happening, but no progress was being made. We found that we needed an extra wrench to get it to move. That got it almost off, when the nut just would not move any more. Vice grips did not help either. This only made things worse. I called my brother and he came to our rescue in short order. I love that guy.
He has a bit of a drive to get to us, so we continued with the lower connections and got those off without any difficulty. This allowed us to reuse the nuts for the bottom, but we still needed to solve the problem with the top connections, and we found that both sides had the same issue. The bottom connections were problem free, but the tops were not coming off. By the time we got to this point, My Brother arrived and gave us some needed company and different perspective.
The Adventure to the stores
We decided that instead of fighting with this for too long. We visited the local hardware store and get new nuts after using my grinder to cut off the old ones. 2 or 3 stores later, we had new hardware in hand and headed home to finish the job. I set my daughter on the path of installing the new link while my brother and I worked on cutting the other side. She did an excellent job. We finished cutting and then stepped aside so she could install the driver’s side link. We all 3 double checked the tightness on the connections for safety and then put the wheels back on and lowered the car. The test drive was nice and quiet. No more wibbly wobbly bumpity bumps.
Now, for the rest of the story.
In the winter, the rear brakes needed done and the local repair shop way overcharged us to fix them (still kind of worth it since I did not have to do it in the winter, but it stung). The informed us that we needed all new shocks and struts in the front and rear. I assume new links would have been part of the total repair, but the cost would have been far higher (guessing around $1100 to $1500). We decided to try it out and learn together with my daughter, and this time, it worked out and we got away with a nice day together learning a good skill and only spending about $85. What a great experience, I am so proud of what we accomplished, and thankful for people in my life that came to our rescue.