What suspension are you running? I tried compacting the spring coil on my Teins on my previous attempt, but it was no luck the entire time, the coils were just too close together.

 

I've always felt uneasy about trying to compress the spring to get those bolts out, if the jack fails or shifts then it's going to create some serious pinch points. It's so easy to just drop the entire strut with a jack under the steering knuckle to control raising/lowering it (I mean you can do it by hand it's just awkward AF) that I strongly recommend just doing it that way.

 

I'd prefer to do it that way as well, but the ball joint nut just spins the bolt endlessly, so that outer section of the arm ain't coming out. I'm toying with the idea of removing the sway bar endlinks and unbolting the inner LCA then dropping the strut, but the inner LCA bolt was kind of annoying to put in (I also have to remove the TBW splash shield to fit a wrench on it with a long enough handle). I only need the spring to drop a half inch, could I get that clearance by just unbolting the strut and pushing it down? Dunno if I could generate enough force to push it down from the top mount enough.

 

Gently pry down the rubber boots on the ball joint , it's ground flat on 2 sides and I think takes a 17mm end wrench to hold it to prevent spinning.

 

Pry down the rubber from the top of the joint? Wish I'd known this when I did my LCA bushings, that would have saved quite a lot of grief.

 

Well, I can't find that 17mm grip spot on top of the ball-joint, and now I can't get the boot back up. Whoops.

 

So, I found an extremely easy way to get the FUCA off. Remove the 18mm nut holding the knuckle to the FUCA (use a 17mm wrench to stop it from spinning). For Tein Basis Z, simply loosen the spring all the way with the two supplied tools; you can not rotate the spring to fit a 14mm socket in there/pull the FUCA mount bolts out, or just use a 14mm wrench to get them out. Don't even need to loosen the top three bolts holding the strut in or the ball joint.

Greasin time!