Before I forget too much, I should summarize the things I've learned along the way for this job. To make things easier, bite the bullet and do the following:

- remove your front mud flaps. Trust me on this, it makes things so much easier to do work at only the cost of removing 2 screws

- Remove the front sway bar. The C-mount that holds the bushings are 12mm. You will need a combo wrench and a racheting wrench w/ extension. The one on the pass side is a beotch b/c of the exhaust pipe. Have fun on that side!

- Remove the steering rack: ok here's where I disagree w/ some people who've done this: just remove the bolts and take the rack off. Its not that difficult and lotsa people seem to make a big deal about removing the bolts. There are two 19mm bolts, one 19mm nut. You will need a racheting wrench for the pass side. The left most bolt is very long and 22m. The middle bolt is more difficult b/c of the hand space at the top nut. Once you have everything unbolted, you can slide the steering rack off. No need to unbolt the steering joint, but definitely support it with a jack stand so there's no undue stress on the joint. The hard lesson learned here is that the rack gets in the way of removing the rear most control arm bolts. I dont know how some people who've written on this job removed the driver's side rear bolt. Seriously. I had to jack up the driver's side of the S-rack to remove the bolt. Trust me on this one, the little time it takes to remove the bolts and have a free swinging/pivoting rack will make your job infinitely easier. Oh, you can remove the end link bolts from the control arm now too. You will need a small pitman remover to do this

- Now is a good time as any to clean off all the accumulated grime off both the sway bar and the rack. Also the bottom cross member support and anything that's close to your body. Expectation of course is that this is a grimy job, but taking a few minutes to clean these parts makes the job so much easier when you reassemble everything.

- You do not need to remove the lower ball joint from the control arm. Just remove the 14mm bolts. Extension needed here too on your ratchet wrench.

- Remove the 19mm nut and bolt that secures the shock at the point of connection w/ the control arm

Now you can remove the control arm adjustment cam bolts. By removing the bolts allow you to remove the cam adjusters and their accompanying front adjustment plate on the other side (i am not sure what the proper names for these parts are, but look at my pics in the preceding posts) Note the following:

- the frontmost cam bolts on the front part of the arms remove towards the FRONT of the vehicle. the rearmost cam bolts on the rear part of the arms remove towards the REAR of the vehicle. They are long and thats why you need to remove and push the steering rack out of the way to remove the rear most adjustment bolts. You will need a 22mm socket and 22mm combo wrench.

When you remove the cam adjusters, I know some people advise you to take pics and match mark the position of the adjustment cam dials. It's a good idea so that you can get close to what it used to be, but don't have any grand illusions that you will get it perfectly back in alignment. you will have to go to the shop to get it aligned.

If any of these cam adjuster are frozen inside the bushings, good f'g luck. 3 out of the 4 slid right out. What I did was to take a screw driver tip and tap it out w/ a hammer. It should be VERY easy to do this. However if the inside of the cam adjuster bolt is frozen solid within the bushing, good luck. What I did was I used a dremel cutting disc (the thicker ones, not the thin ones) to shave down the bolts on both ends. You're probably saying "are you mad?" Yes, i certainly was trying to hammer the one out! So the dremel was the only thing I could think of. It took hours to shave them down. once shaved down, the arm should fall out.

I feel sorry for anyone who has four frozen cam adjusters.

Now for those (including me) who thought about removing the front smaller plate off the control arm bushings and inserting new poly bushings, I don't know how you could get these things off. Many have, but no one in any of the posts described how they removed it. I tried prying them off, chisel hammering it off, but to no avail. If anyone knows how to easily remove them, please post up. Since my bushings were still in great shape and since I couldn't remove these front plates from the bushings, I gave up and just reinstalled everything back with a new cam adjuster and got the alignment.

Note on cam adjuster: I've posted a pic and part number of the cam adjusters. They were reasonable in price so I bought two since one of mine was showing rust and the other one of course was destroyed by rust and dremel'd off.

When I put everything back together on the A-arms, I put a rather generous coat of Marine grade lubricant/protectant grease inside the control arm bushing hole, on the outside of the cam adjusters (the part that slides into the bushing hole), and also on the inside of the cam adjuster plates. I don't want anything to rust and seize again for the next owner and this was the recommendation from the shop that pressed out the seized cam adjuster. Smart advice I would say.

CarQuest / Graves Machine Shop
This place is the shit. Talk with Jody who runs the shop. Phone is 909-982-1856. If you intend to replace the bushings with brand new OEM bushings, save yourself the headache, take everything with you and have him press out and press in new bushings. On my Mercedes he only charged $50 for both arms (4 bushings) to do that. That was 2 years ago. But anyways, he charges a fair price and he's super cool