Finishing the Armada’s Suspension

(“Come on, baby! Lift your big ass for Sasha!”—Actor Yohann Urb uttering the best line in the film as he tries to get a gargantuan Russian cargo plane airborne in the disaster movie 2012.)

I took a break from the Franken-car BMW E30 I bought in early August for a wonderful week-long beach vacation with my wonderful wife in Truro, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. We were celebrating our 40^th anniversary, so we rented a cottage right on the ocean.

It did, of course, beg the question of which of the cars to take. My heart told me to bring Bertha, the heavily-patina’d ’75 BMW 2002 that Maire Anne and I drove off from our wedding in. Having the three of us together on the 40^th seemed like one of those big circle of life things sure to feed resonant-good-vibe energy back into the universe. However, the car has been sitting in storage in the warehouse I rent in Monson, MA, hobbled by a stumbling problem. Maire Anne suggested that, instead, when I get it running properly, we return to the wedding location in Ipswich, MA and recreate the photograph. Add it to the long list of reasons I love my wife.

As I often say, when we want to get somewhere without any drama, we take Maire Anne’s 2013 Honda Fit (its broken front driveshaft notwithstanding). However, a combination of the volume of a week’s worth of vacation stuff, Maire Anne’s wanting to bring her sewing machine and fabric in case rainy weather made her want to hole up and quilt, and my wanting to bring the bikes swung things toward the 2008 Nissan Armada—the vehicle whose purchase I said was a mistake.

The Armada has redeemed itself substantially in my eyes. Not only did I use it to bag and drag the FrankenThirty home from Albany, but I loaned it to my youngest son so he and three friends could go to a music festival in Pennsylvania. It executed both trips without event—well, except for the Carolina Squat-like posture the truck took on when the E30 was on the U-Haul trailer.

The root of this problem was that I’d never completed the work on the Armada’s rear suspension. One of the reasons I bought the truck was that it had the “big tow” package that included a tow mode with altered shift points, a shorter-geared differential, a transmission temperature gauge, and perhaps most importantly, a self-leveling rear suspension with coil springs and shocks with air bags integrated into them so the truck could compensate for a trailer’s weight on the hitch. However, I didn’t know that a) nearly everyone on the Armada forum hates the self-leveling rear suspension and, when it breaks, replaces it with stiffer Moog springs and Bilstein shocks, and b) the air compressor on my truck wasn’t working and both air bags were torn. I’d already done the Moog-Bilstein combination in the front, so doing the same in the rear seemed like a natural, but it wasn’t inexpensive. Plus, replacing the springs meant unbolting the lower spring perch and swinging it down, and I really didn’t want to get dragged down the slippery slope of dealing with the rust-coated rear wishbones unless it was absolutely necessary. In May I almost bought a well-priced set of new-in-box OEM Nissan pneumatic shocks and an aftermarket compressor to rebuild the self-leveling system, but at the last minute swerved when I found a set of open-box Bilsteins on eBay for a great price. I installed the Bilsteins and left the original springs in, which was fine until I began putting weight in the back of the truck. Hence the squat.

Having sold the Winnebago Rialta, the Armada is now the only vehicle I own with lots of interior space and a trailer hitch, so if we wanted to bring the bikes, the Armada it was. I threw all the gear in the back, put the bike rack on the hitch, loaded the bikes on, and we hit the road. It wasn’t until we arrived in Truro that I saw how much the rear was sagging. I was surprised that this amount of weight—a small fraction of a trailer—would sink it so slow. Clearly I needed to complete the rear suspension refresh and augment the Bilstein shocks with the Moog springs.

I decided to order the parts so they’d be at the house when I got back from vacation. I already knew that the best price on the Moog 81085 springs was $194 shipped from RockAuto. I kept hoping to find, as I did with the Bilsteins, an open-box set on eBay or Amazon, but never did. Fine. Click, buy, done. The tough part was that the advice on the Armada forum was to also replace the coil insulators (the spring perch rubber). That made sense, but they’re a dealer-only item with a list price of $26 each, and you need two for each spring, and the idea of spending over a hundred bucks on rubber stuck in my craw. But I searched, found a dealership in Florida that had them priced at $17.50 each, and with a one-time free shipping coupon from joining Nissan’s free VIP program, brought the purchase in at a more comfortable seventy bucks.

Other than the sag when fully loaded, the Armada performed flawlessly. Even its flaky air conditioning behaved. We got home the day before Labor Day. There on my front porch was a heavy box with two Moog 81085 springs in it. The perch isolator rubber, however, hadn’t arrived yet.

No matter. There were some logistical considerations I first needed to deal with. As I’ve described, I really hate to kick the weather-sensitive cars out of the garage to work on the Armada unless it’s absolutely necessary. The Armada barely even fits in the garage with room to work on both sides. The garage, however, is the only place on the property with a cement floor. I can and have worked on vehicles in the asphalt driveway, but I’m assiduously careful to do it only on the flat part all the way at the end, and to use a big ¼-inch-thick sheet of aluminum beneath both the floor jack and the jack stand to avoid either of them sinking into the asphalt. So I moved all the cars out of the right side of the driveway and backed the Armada all the way down to the end.

The weather on Labor Day was gorgeous and crisp, so I thought I’d at least begin the task and get one wheel jacked up (I don’t own a floor jack that can safely lift a vehicle that weighs this much high enough to get both front or rear wheels up and on stands at the same time). I cracked the lug nuts on the right rear wheel, jacked it up, set the corner on a jack stand, made certain both the floor jack and the jack stand were supported and level on the aluminum plate, and pulled off the wheel to expose the spring. I gave the bolt securing the spring perch to the rear knuckle a soaking in SiliKroil. That was all I intended to do.

Then I thought “The nut is right here, it’s exposed, I’m already dirty, why don’t I heat it up with the MAPP gas torch?” About 60 seconds in the flame seemed about right.

Then I thought “You know, it’d just take a minute to see if the nut zips off with the impact wrench or if it’s going to be a knife fight like the ones on the shocks were.” I fired up the compressor, let the impact wrench do its WHACKETA-WHACKETA thing, and after a few chugs, heard the splendid WHACKETA-WHEEEE sound as the nut spun off. Cool.

While I had my head in there, I noticed that the bottom of the spring showed corrosion that had eaten through the plastic coating. It didn’t look fatal, but I was reminded of the fact that, when I bought the truck, both front springs were broken. The fact that these original rear springs might break too wasn’t really part of the calculus in going the Moog-Bilstein route instead of keeping the original springs and getting the rear self-leveling system working, but finding this made me feel good about the replacement.

I still didn’t have the perch rubber, but there was no harm in removing the spring. I supported the lower spring perch with a small floor jack, knocked the bolt out, lowered the jack, and let the perch swing down until the spring tension was off it. It was much easier than expected to manually rotate the spring perch further down, reach in, and pull the spring out. The upper and lower isolators (the perch rubber) came out along with the spring. To my surprise, they looked fine, not even close to worn through. I took a quick look at the nearby rubber bushings on the rear wishbones. They clearly wore the Armada’s 184,000 New England miles. I decided to invoke Hack Mechanic rule #27: It’s silly to have new spring perch rubber that’s in better condition than the rest of the rear suspension rubber bushings when you can return it and get your seventy bucks back. Hey—I make no apologies for these choices. I can never give any one of the 13 vehicles everything it needs.

Well then, I guess we’re installing springs today. There was some risk in doing this as I hadn’t yet looked at the perch rubber on the other side, but the idea of knocking out this entire repair right now was addictive, and doing it on Labor Day seemed wholly appropriate.

The Moog springs are a little taller and thicker than the original ones, and weighed palpably more as measured by my back as I crouched under the wheel well and maneuvered it into position. After jacking the lower perch back up, some amount of twisting was necessary to get the holes for the perch bolt aligned, but in it went.

Right then. Over to the other side of the truck went the aluminum plate, the floor jack, and the jack stand. Off came the other wheel, down came the perch, out came the spring. Its perch rubber also looked fine. What didn’t look fine, though, was the metal-and-rubber bushing on the pivot point of the lower perch. I could see that its metal casing had rusted through.

When you find this sort of thing, you can deal with it in two different ways. One is to put on your “Do it once, do it right” hat and your credit card and take a ride down the slippery slope and replace not only the bushing but also the rust-coated (but not rusted-through) upper and lower rear wishbones, and do so on both sides of the car. The other is to jam your psychic ice ax and crampons into the slippery slope and say “No, it’s not broken, it’s not causing any problems, the amount of work to reach this point was minimal, if I have pull the spring out again it’s not that big of a deal, I came here to install new rear springs to address the saggy rear end, and that’s what I’m going to do.” Guess which path I took?

So the rear suspension is done. It now looks pretty level, though I haven’t tested it yet with weight on the bumper.

There are still a few niggling issues with the Armada. There’s some brake pedal pulsation almost certainly due to deposits on the front rotors from where it sat for many months before I bought it. The passenger door sags badly, needing the lower hinge pin replaced. A catalytic converter efficiency code keeps triggering the check engine light, an indication that the exhaust repair I did at the beginning was just a thumb in a leaky dam. But the scary weird code—the one for camshaft position being over-advanced—hasn’t shown up in months. I assume that whatever variable cam advance gizmo that was stuck got itself unstuck. It’s a very comfortable vehicle to drive, its turning radius is incredibly small for a big SUV, and my wife now likes it. With three successful trips under its belt, maybe the Armada wasn’t such a mistake after all.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.