So, last night, I had one of those nights where I might have burned my DD to the ground if I had only had a match.

Basic synopsis of the work done in a day:
Convert M45 to M46 to take a highway trip. No problems, car has a brand new 240T clutch and rear main, so I leave the whole clutch/cable mess alone and just do a trans. Go home, have a relaxed dinner. M46 doesn't shift as nice as the old M45, but its totally fine and the OD works awesome as does everything else...reverse lights, speedo blah blah.

Then, I get some wild hairs after dinner. Sometime long ago I pulled a set of 6.5" ~250lb pigtailed springs to use on some 240/740 at some point. They are ~11" long and fit under slight tension in the stock struts under full extension and should put the car at very near the stock height that the old ~18" long coat hanger stiffness springs did.

Then, I remember I have a set of SS brake lines, A-arms with poly bushings already in them, a set of ABS strut tubes, bilsteins, GT plates/braces, new power-steer balljoints and tie-rods etc etc. I figure "Hell, all this crap kinda goes together, the car needs struts and springs badly, and has a dying master, why not do brakes and the whole front suspension all in one go?"

So, I start on the passenger side, having put PB on every fastener and brake line on the car since I bought it 8 months ago, things come off really pretty painlessly. I am not going real fast, no real snags. About 2 hours later later that side of the front is totally done and ready to go right down to wheel bearings and deleting the brake dust shields and loading the pads in the calipers. I ASSume, wrongly, the other side will be easier, since, for whatever reason, the brake parts on the passenger side are often more rusty, and having just done one side, I will be well practiced on how to shave time on all those combined jobs. WRONG!

I start on the other side, using the nifty new IR impact of doom, I decide to do something rather daring. Rather than compress the stock spring to get the new volvo strut mount I had already slipped on the car a while back off, I decide to live dangerously. The garage floor is nice and slippery and painted. I put the strut on a smooth sliding blanket and blast the top nut off while bracing myself with a face shield. That part actually worked absolutely awesome! The strut shot about 5 feet across the floor without incident. My hack side was loving this already.

I get the mount off, load up the bilstein in the "new" strut tube, use the bilstein gland new tool and impact the gland nut on and gleefully omit the dust boot (I think they keep the dirt in better than out, personally). This goes fine. I compress the new spring a little and hand thread the big nut at the top of the strut in until it reaches the nylon portion just to make sure it has thread contact and goes on smooth. I grab the impact and impact the nut on. Only, it won't go on! Worse yet, it seems cross threaded so badly I can't get it off! By this time it is about 10pm, and my car has nothing resembling suspension, brakes or steering on the driver side. Using some combination of patience, several sets of vice-grips bent to go up under the upper spring seat and possibly voo-doo that I don't recall, I get the shaft clamped enough that i can zap th top nut off.

I examine the strut. About half way down, the threads are badly cross threaded, though the top threads look completely fine and undamaged by any impacting or other problems. Then I look at the nut and there is a piece of metal jammed between the threads...I suspect welding slag. It is late. My car doesn't run. I'm nowhere near home. I decide I'm beat and out of ideas for how to fix thread without a magic M16x1.5 die that I lack at 10pm on a friday night with no car to go get such a beast even if I could.

Fast forward to 4 am. I wake up, still grumpy and stuff, but I have an idea. I do have an M14x1.5 die, and I have the desire to make it work. Using the big saw, I slice a slit in the M14 die and open it up a bit. It isn't quite round, but I do it anyway. I reason that I really just need to chase the goop jammed in a couple threads out, so not having perfect contact on all 4 cutters isn't critical. I open it up. Then weld it. Then slice the other side and open it up a bit, weld again. And repeat until I have it close to round again and test it on my old junk strut with good threads. By some miracle, it works. I mount the new "tool" in the vice and my strut backwards in the drill press to center it for straight and get it started straight and carefully chase the threads bit by bit. It works, though my hapiness is dampened by the pile of work that is still remaining.

I install the strut in with GT plate and all that. Then, I put the rebuilt caliper on the front left. Before I have any pads, I check that the bleeders are clear. Somewhere in there, the top bleeder snaps off....which is strange, since it isn't rusty and is new. In some horror, I discover whoever rebuilt it has the hole in the caliper threaded for the wrong bleeder. Thankfully, I have a tap and calipers to steal bleeders off of and carefully sort that and install a new bleeder. I clean up the huge mess I made and bleed the brakes good enough so that I have a consistent, though not great brake pedal and limp home. It was just one of those jobs where nothing I planned for went wrong. I had replacement pads, rotors, brake lines, joints etc. Nowhere in there did I plan for a bum strut or someone rebuilding a caliper and threading the bleeder wrong. Guess I should have checked the bleeder earlier in the week.

In the good news, the car handles really pretty decent. With so little weight on the nose, the bils match the stiff springs very well. It doesn't feel super harsh, but I'd need much stiffer and stickier tires to say for sure. It is also kind of pointless to set up the suspension for anything before i put the LSD I have in it.

Sounds like a typical "3 hour" project for me... that ends up being 3 days. Glad it worked out and your hooptie is not in flames.