I guess I've not spent enough time in the 'comfort' seats for them to be uncomfortable yet. The headrest does seem too far back from my head though...
I need to take the boot floor apart to get to the top of rear dampers, so looking for anything that might be clunking or rattling as I go...
First up, the wrench doesn't clip in securely and rattles (fixed with a little cloth tape underneath it), and the jack handle wasn't clipped in...
Plastics out -
Well, that's a very professional install of something... Turns out it's a GPS tracking box and a little battery for it. At one point they were duct taped in place, but the tape has perished and now they're just sitting loose, metal on metal. I'll bet that's a good clunk I can hear. I cut it out of the harness, fixed the harness back into the original clips and chucked the tracker in the bin.
Removing the next bit of load space floor reveals the panels for the damper top mounts - three screws per panel and the top mounts are accessible.
It turns out the rear dampers on this car are really easy to swap out. Three bolts at the top, jack up the car, wheel off, lower damper bolt out, and the assembly just falls out.
Old damper had very little gas pressure left and the spring aid had gone very soft. New Sachs (OE) damper and spring aid to go on. Thankfully the old op mounts were in good shape as I didn't order new ones.
While the damper was off, do the droplink - The rear ones didn't feel shot, but the ball joints were on the looser side, so might as well while I'm there. I hadn't realised quite what a pain they'd be! Access to the top bolt wasn't bad, but access to the bottom is a nightmare as the driveshaft blocks all access from the front, air spring from the top and lower arm from the bottom. It's a case of turning it about 30 degrees at a time with a spanner - with the rusty thread fighting you hard.
It took about 20min to get the old one off and about 10 to put the new Meyle one on... Only to remove the spanner on the ball joint side and find it covered in grease 
It turns out that the new droplinks have quite thin flat faces to hold them with a spanner on the ball joint side, and if your spanner is wider than these faces (it was) it pops the boot off. Another 10 minutes spent inching the droplink off again, pop the boot back in place, get my thinnest 16mm spanner out, which is only about 0.5mm wider than the flat faces, spend another eternity tightening the nyloc back on... and off pops the boot. Grrrrr. Meyle droplink back off, I give up, and the old original one goes back on. I even tried a set of old cone spanners for bike wheels, but they were too wide and wouldn't fit inside the droplinks mounting.
Thankfully the ARB bushes went in with far less of a fight. New ones are softer than I would have expected, but still a lot firmer than the ones I removed.
One side all done.
The other side was far quicker - I didn't touch the droplink! Damper and ARB Bush went on no problem at all.
Before moving onto the front suspension I took a detour into the engine bay - and a detour in the naritive. After buying the car, I realised very quickly that if I floored it and let the engine rev out, not only did it go pretty well, it also left a very black, very big smoke screen in its wake. Not overly surprising, it's an old, pre DPF diesel and quite likely hasn't been driven hard so likely has some 'clearing out' to do on top of the natural tendency to smoke. I've been running diesel injector cleaner with the fuel, and latest fill up (39mpg now!) winced at the price of V-Power. The high throttle smoke is getting lighter, but definitely still there.
What I hadn't realised until I was driving at dusk with a car behind me the other day, is that it's actually smoking in general driving. Accelerating pretty gently up to dual carriageway speeds I realised I could see quite a lot of haze in the lights from the car behind me. Oh dear. The M57 engine isn't known for being smokey, and besides, I really dislike driving a smoking car.
A little research pointed me towards the normal culprits being a clogged EGR valve (surprise surprise) and a clogged, 'loo roll' style oil filter in the CCV as
oioisavaloy mentioned earlier in this thread - so lets start with those.
It's the first time I've really had a look at the engine bay, I've been too distracted by the suspension! Normally the first thing I do with a new car would be an oil and filters service... I'm still getting round to that. It has about 2k miles left on it's service interval still at least.
Covers off to get to the EGR, handily right at the front of the engine.
A little fighting with Jubilee clips and hoses - it's definitely not been taken off for a while - and...
Lovely. The actuator still moves freely, but the carbon build up around it isn't great. I've no idea how bad these have to be before they cause issues, but it doesn't look great - maybe about 30% down on csa?
A little time with a scraper, cloths and brake cleaner...
That's better.
Now onto the CCV. Airbox off, injector wiring loom unbolted and hooked out the way, CCV out...
Yep, that's the old loo roll style filter, and it's pretty minging. Not much I can do immediately other than order a new vortex style unit and pop this back on in the mean time. While I was looking around the engine bay I noticed a few very chafed vacuum lines that could definitely do with replacing too.
Detour done, back to suspension.
The front struts came out really easily. Disconnect droplink and height sensor, remove pinch bolt that holds the damper into the knuckle, undo the three top mount bolts under the bonnet, stand on the brake caliper to push the suspension down, pull the top of the strut out from under the wing and knock it out up out of the hub with a few hammer blows.
Good job I bought new top mounts for these ones - there's the cause of some of the front knocks! The spring aids are also falling apart.
New Lemforder top mount, Sachs damper and meyle ARB to go on...
To swap the top mounts over there was a very recessed 21mm(?) nut that you needed to turn while holding the damper shaft still with an 8mm allen key - standard damper design, but there was no way to get a ring spanner down to this nut which is how I've always done it in the past. Thankfully a large spark plug socket fit, and had an external hex I could get the ring spanner on while the allen key fit through the centre of it.
Old and new - and general clutter. As you can see in the picture, the spring has a very low coil count, and my spring compressors couldn't compress it enough really. When I removed the old top mount there was still a little pressure on it (which I was aware of and working very carefully with it) so it popped off when the bolt was undone. That meant that there was no way I could get the strut assembly back together off the car. I ended up bolting the top mount into the car, putting the damper and spring in place under the wing, lining everything up and using a jack to compress the spring and push the damper shaft into the top mount. It's not as dangerous as it first sounds as the spring and damper get seated quite deeply in the turret and can't really go anywhere (I tested this theory - on purpose of course.... ahem). Lining everything up was a royal pita but we got it in eventually.
The droplink I removed from this side had a split boot, but no actual play in it, however when I started fitting the new droplink the play in the link on the other side of the car was very obvious!
You can't really tell in the gif, but that's going clunk clunk clunk! It also shows that the front ARB bushes are looser than ideal. Everything went back together smoothly and I moved onto the nearside.
No height sensor to worry about, but the droplink was definitely older than the one on the offside had been and utterly refused to come off. I ended up cutting it off with a dremel.
Half way through I put a new cutting disc on... the moment I touched it to metal the cutting material of the disk exploded on me. Thankfully I had eye protection on and I had been careful not to be in line with the disc. I'm always wary of these cheap chinese cutting discs, but this is the first time I've had one explode in years of using them. Interestingly it left all the reinforcement webbing intact and still attached to the dremel:
That was my last disc too... had to finish the job with a hacksaw.
Other than that bit of drama it went smoothly until it came to compressing the spring in the car and lining the damper shaft up with the top mount. This was a lot more difficult than it had been on the other side and took over an hour with countless attempts. Naturally it started pouring down while we were doing it too. While we were struggling with it I realised why it was so much harder than the other side... there's a thick washer that sits between the spring seat and the top mount, without which the spring seat sit on the top mount body rather than the bearing, so moving the steering would grind them together............. I'd missed that washer out when reassembling the other side
As the rain was getting heavier and it was definitely past dinner time I decided that it could be a job for mañana - I've got a dubiously reliable Mx5 to use in the mean time!
Other than that - you're giving it a thorough going over and is going to ride much better than mine once you've finished (than mine ever rode).
