Man I have no luck with this car. I just attempted to do my front sway bar endlinks on my evo ix mr. Pretty easy job, few bolts and away you go. WRONG.

First it started with the brake air guides. They were in the way of the bolts holding the endlink to the lower control arm, so I'll take them off, a couple 10mm's no big deal right? SNAP....... SNAP. Ok so it isn't essential, I can always replace those. On to the bracket.

14mm grade 7 bolts hold the endlinks to the lower control arm. This should be a breeze. SNAP...... this isn't good...... SNAP. Both effing bolts snapped in the aluminum control arm. Worse case scenario. At this point I'm making a sailor look like a saint. My best chance is just to remove the endlink from the sway bar and figure out the control arm later.

Ok so it's a 14mm nut on a stud with an Allen key hole on the end of it. Pretty easy, same idea as a strut. Ya not so much. Without the link held in place to the LCA, there was no way I could get enough torque on there to break it loose. I hit the brick wall. I don't have any specialty tools, ie. a torch, to heat them up or at the very least cut cut them off.

So now I'm left with a driver's side endlink that's zip-tied out of the way so I can limp the car to my mechanic and have the professionals handle it. It seems any time I do any work on this car, my pile of broken bolts gets bigger. Would it have killed them to use higher quality bolts? This is a problem that has plagued DSM's for years, you'd think on the Evo they would have stepped it up.

 

That sucks... Ive had that experience with past cars. So far so good with the Evo, but I have a bunch of car parts to put on. Hopefully it goes smoothly