So, today was one of my proudest "what have you done to your car today" moments - I managed to change one of the air suspension shock absorbers on my Jag, something I never thought I'd be able to do.
I thought I'd take advantage of my dad being over here as another pair of hands really helps, and also made friends with some fireman who let me play with their massive tools
So, here's how I did it:
First of all, I should probably say this is very, very difficult. I admit I am an amateur with regards to mechanics, but I've changed wheel bearings, heater resistors, callipers etc in the past without much trouble, and I'd say this is 10x more difficult.
This is how it looked when I started:
As you can see, the shock had totally failed, punching a hole through the dust cover.
The first thing to do is to loosen the wheel nuts, then jack the car up, disconnect the battery and take off the wheel. This allows the air suspension ECU to enter its "jacked up" state, which is then remains in when you disconnect the battery.
You can then follow the steps on this video, but I encountered several complications
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB7FIf0rjy4
In the video, they loosen the nut on the air line easily, and it pops off as you'd expect. In my case, it also loosened easily, but it took the entire connector that sits in the inside of the shock with it, which made it very difficult to get apart. It's much better to undo the nut whilst using a pair of mole grips on the lower part of the air connector to stop the whole plug unscrewing.
Equally, on the video, they put the car in neutral and disable the handbrake. This is all well and good, but in the manual it states that under no circumstances should you disconnect the battery with the instrument cluster activated. To put the car in neutral, you have to turn on the ignition, thus activating the instrument cluster, and whilst the manual could have been scaremongering, I wasn't willing to take that risk, so I left the car in park with the handbrake on.
This is an issue as, on the right hand side of the car, if you need to remove the stabiliser arm, as you're instructed to do, you need to remove the parking brake calliper, which cannot be done when the parking brake is activated. This meant I had to find a way of removing the shock without removing the stabiliser arm.
Of course, in order to remove the shock, you need to remove the large lower bolt, and this was what posed the biggest problem. Shocks on these cars are generally lifetime components, and mine had certainly never been changed. The large bottom bolt was seized solid, and it was only with the help of the firemen that we managed to get it undone. And then, as soon as that was undone, it became obvious that the shock was not going to come out through the gap between the driveshaft and the stabiliser arm without some serious manoeuvring.
It is however, just about possible provided you use a jack to support the whole hub assembly, and then move it all up/down as required and constantly jiggle it from side to side. This alone took me easily 1-2 hours, and could have totally been avoided if I'd been able to remove the stabiliser arm, but sadly that wasn't an option.
Once it was finally through, it has to be pushed up through the car, so that the securing bolts and air line socket poke through into the boot area. This is also incredibly difficult: I genuinely thought at several points that they must have sent me the wrong shock, as the bolts and holes just refused to line up. I finally managed it by putting a jack at the bottom of the shock, then gently moving it up and using the jack to support it, so that I could concentrate purely on moving it from side to side.
Once it's in position, you connect everything up, and with the car still up in the air on the jack, reconnect the battery and start the engine. As the car is now in exactly the same state it was when the battery was disconnected, the air suspension system doesn't realise anything has changed, and therefore doesn't need to be recalibrated. The system will begin to fill up the air shocks, so leave it running for 5 minutes, then gently lower it down at which point it should resume a normal height. Some people found they needed to drive the car for a while to get it to settle, but mine was fine from the start.
So there you go - not easy by any means, and it took me about 5-6 hours, but I know the job has been done properly and I've probably saved myself about €1000, so I'm happy.
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