[cdgatti]

thanks avocet... no there weren't any thread showing thru the nut yet. I went to my local tire/battery/oil change place and those guys bailed me out. Here's what they did.

they slid the bilstein dust boot up, well crumpled it up as it is very thin plastic, then put a vice grip on the shock shaft as high up as possible so the potentially damaged part of the shaft won't see too much action in the shock body, then used a pneumatic wrench to tighten down the top mount. I was so relieved, they were the only place still open late in the afternoon on a Saturday. They charged me $21! I offered to tip $20 and they wouldn't take it. Who says service is dead.

Well follow up after my install ordeal.... first off there was some discussion about removing the wheels or not when installing these, you probably don't have to, I did find it easier to remove the passenger side wheel so I got better access for pulling the shock down out of the top mounting hole to replace the bushing. The bilstein gas pressure is pretty high, so compressing the shock by hand is fairly difficult for this not so young guy! for some reason on the driver side I was able to maneuver around the tire/wheel to reach up from below and pull the shock down. Anyway on to the feel with these afterwards.... they are firmer, almost like my shocks/springs were changed. I guess it is because the rear shocks are now dampening smaller movements than before, perhaps the softer bushings were taking up that first mm or 2mm of movement and now the shock has to. I'll have to live with them a little longer over a variety of surfaces to see if they improved the secondary oscillations that I would get when going over some bumps or coming to a stop.

Had some more opportunity to test, this time at high speed on some smooth and bumpy highway. The feeling I get from the back of the car now, is that I can feel the bilsteins working to absorb smaller bumps. So they either are working harder because of the more secure mounting into the car OR they always did this and the foam mounts just masked it from being felt. Either way I think they work well.