As my previous post indicated, that turned into a bit of an ordeal. Right out of the gate we couldn't get the windshield wipers off. PB Blaster and a small hammer, then a larger hammer, and then a parts store gear puller all failed to get them to even budge (we actually bent the gear puller on the damn windshield wipers). We finally tasted victory with a better gear puller (a Huskey 4-ton puller from Lowes) and a good dimple we put in the center of the shaft with a drill to keep the puller centered. Of all the things to thoroughly over-engineer, apparently GM picked the wipers. Between pulling, pounding, swearing, and making runs out for more tools, it wound up being about a two hour affair. For the WINDSHIELD WIPERS.
The passenger side strut wasn't too difficult, just took a little effort. The one thing we really buggered up was thinking that the sway bar end link took a hex key in the end of the shaft, which we learned after we stripped it and then scraped out the corrosion was actually torx (I think it was a t30, I'd have to check to be sure). I'm replacing the sway bar end links anyway (more on that later...), so not really a big deal. We got it torqued back down to our satisfaction, at least enough to run on for a week or two.
The driver's side was a real bastard. The strut shaft and mounting nut appeared to have been badly damaged on assembly (per the relative I bought the car from the front suspension had never been apart, and I'm inclined to trust him), and had rusted to a degree that was totally incongruous with the rest of the car. The threads of the strut shaft were damaged, the nut was beat to crap, it was well and truly farked, which presented a couple of problems. As we didn't have a pass-through socket of deep offset wrench large enough (24mm) or any of the various specialty strut shaft tools at our disposal, and the nut is set in too deep to grab even with the open end of a combination wrench, our options were pretty limited in terms of what to do to get it free. With a normal socket it would just spin the whole strut shaft freely without loosening the nut. Eventually we broke down and cut some notches around the exterior of the bolt with a dremel, held the strut shaft with a t50 that we had to hammer in on account of all the rust, and tapped it around with a hammer and cold chisel until it got too hung up on the damaged threads to turn even under the force of the hammer. From there we had enough clearance to just cut it off with the dremel. This, again, after much sweating and swearing trying to figure out a better way, and a couple of runs to the parts store for different tools. After that nonsense, it went pretty easily. Having gotten the hang of it with the other side, it was all back together in 10 minutes after that. I robbed a nut off the factory strut in place of the one we destroyed, and will replace it with the proper OEM top nut when that comes in the mail next week.
The rear was pretty straightforward, but not quite as direct-fit as Totsu's writeup on the build seemed to suggest. The Trax/Encore spring is actually about the same length, but considerably thicker than the Sonic spring, and it took a lot of trimming to make the isolator fit the bottom of the spring. Perhaps their shape differed a little from the batch Totsu was working with, as it has been several years. Also, when changing the shock mounts over a pass-through socket set really pays dividends. Rather than having to employ the vice and rubber strap as described in Totsu's post, you can just use a torx bit on the shock shaft and turn the nut with the ratchet.
