I’ve never met a leaf spring bolt I liked.

But before that, we’ve made good progress on the truck. The rear brake line was shot, completely and totally, so I got that replaced.

Notice the gaping chasm in my brake line. That had to go.

The grill is back on, though the driver’s side headlight still needs to be attached. Some very minor body rust has been welded and smoothed over with bondo as well. All that is really left are the leaf springs. I left those for last because I knew it would be an uphill battle.

The past three days have been spent trying to knock the front bolt of the rear spring out. Banging, wrenching, whacking, lubricating, and finally cutting to get this bastard of a bolt out. My dad almost broke my arm with a sledge hammer when he miss his mark and whacked my wrist. It’s cool though. We even put a torch to it for an extended amount of time, with no results. My dad came up with some crazy contraption using whatever was at hand, but it made no progress. Whoever designed this leaf spring with a metal sleeve should be beaten with a switch.

This is the odd contraption my dad came up with, utilizing the U-bolts and a harmonic balancer pulley to get the bolt out. No dice.

After the wrist incident, I convinced my dad the only way to get it out was to cut if off. So I went to the auto parts store and ordered new bolts and shackles, which should be in Friday. Then I went to the hardware store and bought a diamond grit sawzall blade. Diamond grit! Should be able to cut through anything, right?

Sorta. It did eventually get through one side of the bolt, after a good 25-30 minutes of on-and-off sawing. And the other side still needed to be cut off. So we turned to the trusty cutting wheel!

Thirty seconds to cut through the bolt, another two minutes of leveraging, and the leaf spring popped out.

Sometimes, the must brute-force options are the best.

So there we are, my dad and I staring at this hundred-pound hunk of metal that has for three days frustrated us, turned us against each other, and almost caused seriously bodily harm.

As calm as could be, he looks at the leaf spring and says “Oh, doesn’t even look like this side needed to be replaced.”