Nissan Micra K12

Jack up the  car and support on stands- I put the car on Halfords axle stands on the first pin position. Higher would be better as you do need a bit of room underneath to wield a breaker bar or torque wrench! I currently have 4 post ramp-envy! If you look at the A utodoc vid for changing Micra wishbones, you will see that its merely a 10 min job... yeah and the rest! Expect to take around an hour at least depending on how much trouble there is in releasing everything. The vid also shows a Micra 3 which is marginally different as it lacks the front sub frame support brackets.  The first step is to remove the wheel and then loosen the ball joint pinch bolt. You will need a 16mm spanner to hold the nut and an impact wrench with an extension bar. Tools for the pinch bolt The nut comes undone relatively easily but it cab be a pig to remove the bolt once the nut is off. Use penetrating oil, refit the nut and hammer it out... you can see the rust that sticks it in. I found it

Having sorted the front shocks- and made a slight improvement to the suspension noise, I decided to move on to the rears. I was also aware that corroded rear springs had appeared on the last MOT list of advisories so it was probably a good time to swap those too- although to be fair a slightly corroded spring would probably last for years! Anyway I bought two MAPCO  rear shocks 20509 with new top mounts (Sachs  802 580) as well as two Blueprint rear springs. The job is relatively simple and straightforward provided that the parts supplied are correct. Obviously you cant can't compare new to old until you have stripped the old, but you can at least make sure that the new top mounts do fit the new shocks! I failed to do this and came to regret it. The first step is to jack up the rear- although this is strictly only necessary  if you are changing the springs- you can change the shocks without raising the car! I jacked using a pad under the rear spring seat ... and

This car has had a really annoying knocking or rumble from the suspension ever since I got it. At first I suspected ARB drop links- a cheap and easy fix, but swapping these has made no improvement. I took the car to 2 garages to try to diagnose the fault and neither could find anything obvious. Their advice was to keep driving it until whatever is causing the noise wears sufficiently to be obvious- I'm not keen to put up with it for that long and anyway I could do with a bit more experience on a modern car. The garages could find no faults with ball joints or wishbone bushes- or indeed the sub-frame bushes themselves but  there is a problem so it has to be somewhere, and given that its not obvious, I assume it has to be something hidden. My suspicions next fell on the struts and shocks which could be rattling inside even though they pass the bounce test and are not leaking. It could also be the ARB bushes which are hidden from sight above the front sub-frame. So moving on in m