So I get up this morning all excited and ready to swap out my leafs and shocks. I get started and goi to remove the small bolt in the rear sway bar and it turns a bit hard, no big deal, I spray it down PB tighten it down again and back it off... Snap! it breaks off. That should have been my first clue to just walk away., but no.

I loosen the bolts on top of the retainer plates and they all come off with normal elbow grease and I think Ok, things are looking up! Wrong.

Both front bolts had the inserts rusted to them and just spun inside the rubber and had to be cut off on both sides of the spring.

Both shackle bolts had the inserts rusted to them and also spun inside the rubber and had to be cut off once the back side was clear of the nut.

Leafs off, may as well do the old OE shocks as well! Of course all 4 bolts broke right off.

I didn't plan on having to replace the shackles, bolts etc, so now I am stuck for a couple of days. Lots of time to drill and tap the shock mount holes!

Anyone know a good place to get some shackles with maybe a 1-2" lift that wont rape me on shipping?

 

Quadratec has free shipping if you search through google shopping. I recently bought shackes through them this way.

 

Yeah some will say you should pb blast everything over a few days
Before u start wrenching. Check these out, they say they lower but they lift our xjs
http://www.autozone.com/autozone/acc...er=204654_0_0_

Also read this thread about them
https://www.cherokeeforum.com/f67/au...hackles-79913/

 

Trust me, I soaked them every night for a week.

Thanks for the link, they are in stock 1 mile from my house!

 

Lol yeah sometimes it wont matter how much u soak em, they'll snap
No prob, that's what the forums for.

 

You gotta live up north.I soaked mine for close to 2 months & some were still a pain to remove & I live in the south.

 

Kinda, Indianapolis. I dread drilling those shock bolts out. I was thinking about nocking the nuts out like a few on here said, but I don't see how I can fish a bolt through there AND be able to tighten it down...

 

It's real easy, just use fishing line, trust me. It sounds difficult, but it's not. The hardest part is knocking the weld nuts out.

 

I just wanted to say thank you for justifying my decision to keep putting this job off, lol.

 

Picked tghem up this morning, did not fit anywhere other than the lowest hole so I had to take them back as I don't want a 4"+ lift, which is what it measured out to be holding it next to the old shackle.

Hopefully NAPA has OE ones in stock as neither Autozone nor Advance Auto near me do...

 

I found it odd that I brake all kinds of bolts on newer XJ's but on my 86, everything turned right out like it was put in a month ago, not 25 years. Springs and shock bolts were originals too. No matter how much you prelube things, it will still fight you.

 

Ok so I got bored about 15min into drilling the shock mount bolts out and got out the impact hammer and knocked them out. I must say, they came out with about 3 pulls of the trigger. That totally surprised me as stuff like that in my experience usually leads to bigger issues. As far as getting new bolts in through the holes, I used an extendable magnet tool and put the bolts in in less than 2 min total.

Anyhow, I took pictures and will post a how to thread in the "How to Section".

 

Told you it was easy. I used an air chisel too.

 

Yeah, I was surprised at how easy it was.

I needed to replace all 6 of the Leaf spring bolts I cut out so I went looking around yesterday at all of the local hardware stores. The larges any of them had was 12mm X 100mm. You would think that in a city as large as Indianapolis, someone would have 14MM x 130MM 2.0 bolts but no, only the dealer had them. $9.70 a piece and $6.81 per nut.

Here is what $75 worth of bolts looks like...

 

I ended up having to do the same thing. Those suckers aren't cheap.