Type-44: Front strut cap removal & Bilstein upgrade

[Ameer Antar]

I just wanted to let you know about my experience w/ my front strut upgrade project. I didn't realize that Bilstein's come w/ their own strut cap. Hopefully this info will help other listers from spending money on trying to save or buy new strut caps if they switch to Bilsteins. (Also, the Bilstein instructions say you don't need to use the OE bump stops, and the strut piston is too large for them anyway).

So I decided to just take off the strut caps off w/ a pipe wrench since I won't need them after. I put the strut assembly in a vice. The first one was pretty easy. The second one was a real b!%@#. No matter how much pipe I added onto the wrench, that thing wouldn't budge. I even bent the outer plates of the strut assembly a little. I hope this doesn't affect alignment??!! So after much deliberating I decided to just cut off the cap. This was a delicate procedure b/c I didn't want to further damage the assembly. I pushed the strut piston all the way in to give me more room. Then I used a Dremel cut-off wheel to carefully cut through the cap. It took a while and I had to cut a little throught the strut piston, but there was only a small nick in the strut assembly where the wheel jumped a little. After making one cut perpendicular to the thread, it still was hard to turn, so I used a drift and hammer to twist it off. I found a lot of rust right under the cap and top of the strut that had welded together. In this case, I think this is the only way it would have worked. If I had tried any harder the regular way I might have had to throw out that strut housing. Hoepfully I'll never have to do that again, especially since the Bilstein's use a much better strut cap design. Hope this will help some frustrated lister someday...

-Ameer