Control your arms, on the down low. + springy struttin

In making this thing not such a wallowing hippo on the road I’ve decided to take on the installation. This is the first time I’ve dug into this, and found that it wasn’t too terrible of an undertaking. Though that is a reason I bought an easy to work on Civic.

On with the show.

Here are the new struts and springs that I decided to pick up. I’ve always been a fan of bilstein shocks and struts, so going with my preference there I got some HD struts for the 90 hatch back. The springs are H&R, coincidentally also German made. They are for a 94-01 Integra. They are their OE springs which allows for stock ride height.

It’s been covered elsewhere but just a quick recap on why this combination. The rear struts of a wagon, have a much lower seat than the sedan/hatch. As such you can’t just intermix them, and unfortunately the wagon struts are harder to find. Especially so in anything but plain jane struts. Also I’m not a fan of coil overs, so that was not an option for me.

That said you run the integra springs on the civic struts as they give you the height that the regular civic springs don’t. For reference, the below photo is with the struts and springs fully installed in the rear. No loss of ride height at all for me with this combo. I’ll update the photo when I get the front struts and springs installed.

My LCA choice was function 7 as I plan on installing a rear sway bar as well.

Beefy!

Tearing in to it. Jack up the car, support it properly, remove the wheel. Then you are going to remove the three bolts from the lower control arm. If I recall these are all 14mm bolts and the one for the strut has a nut on it.

I have a jack under there as I was doing trailing arm work at the same time. And as the spring is pushing against the arm anyway you need to remove a bit of tension.

With these three bolts removed you can easily pry the trailing arm out, lower the jack and the spring should help pop it out. It might take a bit of wiggling, but it should come out fairly easily.

Then put your jack back under the strut. Just so when you remove it it doesn’t just drop out. If you’re replacing it I guess it doesn’t especially matter if it drops.

Then you undo the 14mm bolts holding the assembly in. These are easy to get to through the access panels in back. I forgot to get a pic so I’ll post one up ASAP.

Disassembly of the old unit is fairly straight forward. You can live dangerously and just take an impact to the nut and launch the strut across the driveway. Or you can use spring compressors.

You’ll need the top hat and inner sleeve in the two rubber bushings, if you’re replacing the bushings. If you aren’t you ca leave that whole assembly together. Check the rubber spring seat for any severe damage. Mine were actually in decent shape and could have been reused, but I had new ones on hand anyway.

Assembling the new unit, you’re going to need to compress the spring as such.

Once you have it compressed enough you can drop it over the strut, cram the top hat on and get that nut in place. I found with the energy suspension top hat bushings that you had to press down on it a good bit and try to wrangle that nut on, even with the spring fairly well compressed. Just FYI.

Then just pop the assembled unit in place use the jack, or a friend to hold it and tighten the nuts up top. Same as disassembly.

Then install your lower control arm. I’m not certain if there is a correct order for this, I started with the strut. Then used the jack to compress it a bit to get it in the other two spots.

Like here.

Also the end bolts have a cone end to help guide them into place a little better. I did have to smack things around a bit with the rubber mallet, but it wasn’t anything excessive. Just a few taps here and there to get it lined up enough for the bolt to go in without too much difficulty.

I know a few more pics could be added so I’ll work on that. I’ll also be detailing the front install in a future update.