They say high ground clearance is a mindset . . .
The huge dents in my undercarriage would like to have a word, while that's mostly true, it turns out you can augment your Bolt's offroad capability with a cheap lift kit off ebay.
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Installing it is about as intuitive as you'd expect, with a couple caveats:
When you are renting/buying spring compressors, make sure they are pretty short, I had a lot of trouble positioning the compressors to where it wouldn't hit into the frame of the car.
Furthermore, if you undo both rear struts (instead of one at a time) you can release the springs which makes removing them a whole heck of a lot easier to work with.
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You can also avoid taking off the wheel well covers, my rear ones were pretty destroyed, so I removed them to attempt to fix them, which did make it easier. If you have intact liners, I'd recommend leaving them installed and working around them.
For the front suspension, I found it to be significantly easier than the rear, thanks to the fact that spring compressors are not needed. You can also leave the wheel liners in, which speeds up installation. My biggest recommendation is removing the hood, that really helped us with working space to get the window wiper motors out. Which we found necessary to remove. We circumvented taking the window wiper arms off by taking the wiper blades off, and lifting the plastic cover off of them, tetris style. This saved us a lot of hassle of hunting down the correct piece to remove the wiper arms. Once that's off there are three screws, undo those.
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We then undid this part, I'm not sure what it's called, however I jacked up the suspension and wiggled it off, you need an allen key to get it off.
![Image]()
and then break the orange tab off the little hat thing on top of the spring. you can then just barely slip the spacers on top of the hats, and then jack the suspension back into place, making sure to slowly align everything.
This was a big upgrade to the Bolt that I've wanted to do for years, thanks to Keith for sending me the right ebay link for the lift kit. You have to get an alignment done afterwards, but it's totally worth it.
I will be testing it offroad soon, the next thing that needs to be installed beforehand is a steel skidplate, as all of the underbody shielding has been destroyed under my car and there are lots of pipes/wires exposed.
The huge dents in my undercarriage would like to have a word, while that's mostly true, it turns out you can augment your Bolt's offroad capability with a cheap lift kit off ebay.
Installing it is about as intuitive as you'd expect, with a couple caveats:
When you are renting/buying spring compressors, make sure they are pretty short, I had a lot of trouble positioning the compressors to where it wouldn't hit into the frame of the car.
Furthermore, if you undo both rear struts (instead of one at a time) you can release the springs which makes removing them a whole heck of a lot easier to work with.
You can also avoid taking off the wheel well covers, my rear ones were pretty destroyed, so I removed them to attempt to fix them, which did make it easier. If you have intact liners, I'd recommend leaving them installed and working around them.
For the front suspension, I found it to be significantly easier than the rear, thanks to the fact that spring compressors are not needed. You can also leave the wheel liners in, which speeds up installation. My biggest recommendation is removing the hood, that really helped us with working space to get the window wiper motors out. Which we found necessary to remove. We circumvented taking the window wiper arms off by taking the wiper blades off, and lifting the plastic cover off of them, tetris style. This saved us a lot of hassle of hunting down the correct piece to remove the wiper arms. Once that's off there are three screws, undo those.
We then undid this part, I'm not sure what it's called, however I jacked up the suspension and wiggled it off, you need an allen key to get it off.
and then break the orange tab off the little hat thing on top of the spring. you can then just barely slip the spacers on top of the hats, and then jack the suspension back into place, making sure to slowly align everything.
This was a big upgrade to the Bolt that I've wanted to do for years, thanks to Keith for sending me the right ebay link for the lift kit. You have to get an alignment done afterwards, but it's totally worth it.
I will be testing it offroad soon, the next thing that needs to be installed beforehand is a steel skidplate, as all of the underbody shielding has been destroyed under my car and there are lots of pipes/wires exposed.
That being said I also don't need / wont be doing this.
