Cant Remove Shock Absorber From Rusty Mounting Stud Try These Removal Tricks

Are you ever doing shocks, nice and quick and easy job, and you go to take the last bolt out and when you're taking the shock off, it's frozen to the knuckle? Well, that happened to us, and we're going to show you how to fix it. Let's talk about what's going on here first. We have the bottom part of the shock, and you have the rubber bushing in there, and then you have a metal sleeve. And the metal sleeve is actually frozen to this knuckle stud, which it's because it's rusted, there's gotten moisture in there and over time, it's just swelled up and it won't come off. Some of the things we've tried is just taking a hammer,
giving it a tap, but because of the rubber, it doesn't allow you to do anything. And then we've sprayed some rust penetrant in there but realistically, we don't have time for this rust penetrant to do its job. If you could spray it and leave it overnight, maybe even a couple of nights, maybe it would loosen up, but we don't have time. I've taken an air hammer from the backside and tried to chisel it forward. It's not even budging. Ideally, if you could heat this up, that would be perfect. So then it would swell a little bit and then you could slide it off. But the problem is it is a gas-pressurized shock and you don't want to put any heat near a shock, it could be very dangerous.

So what I'm going to do is take a puller. This happens to be a pitman arm puller and it actually fits pretty good. Now we're gonna try pulling this off. And that actually worked really well. Got it. So that actually worked for us, that pulled right off. Now what I expected to happen was the bushing to stay attached depending on how frozen that was. I expected the shock to push the bushing through but that didn't happen. So that worked out in our favor. But what would you do if it did pull the bushing through? So with the sleeve stuck on there and the shock off, at this point, if you wanted to heat it up, it is a little bit safer. The only thing is you don't really want to heat this knuckle up and we don't want to heat that stud up. So let's not do that. But what we can do is take a cutting blade and very carefully slice down the side of the bushing. It is going to smell a little bit once you get to the rubber part, the rubber is going to melt and stuff, but this is probably one of the best options. You could try hammering and again now that the shock's off. Maybe this shock was taking some of the dampening of the hammering it with the air chisel, but let's give this a try.

As you're cutting, and you don't want to cut too far through there, get pretty close. Just keep checking, making sure you're not getting into the stud area. Once you slice it down pretty deep without hitting the stud, take a chisel. See if you can separate this a little bit. Even if you just move it, you might be able to get it to spin. Like that. And once you get it to spin, you might be able to try to chisel it off. There we go. There you go. And it came pretty close but we didn't hit any other stud. If you just mark up the stud a little bit, it's going to be okay. After you're done, just take a wire brush and clean up some of the rust build-up, or you can use some sandpaper or emery cloth. If there's anything that I missed, any other ideas that you guys have had, leave me a comment below. If you enjoyed this video and it helped you out, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.