Suspension arms are attached to the car through rubber bushings that have a metal sleeve in the middle where the bolt goes through. In rustier areas of the country like where I live, that means the bolts can be very hard to remove. I reposted an old blog post recently about a “Friday Morning Nightmare” I had at Toyota trying to get bolt out of a bushing. When replacing the rear shocks and lower control arms on my 1997 Civic it took a lot to get the bolts out

Once again, last week, I was replacing a lower control arm on a 2013 Honda Odyssey and ran into this problem. I had to use an air hammer to try to push the bolt out of the bushing, but even with that I needed to heat it with a torch. Eventually that completely burned out the rubber portion of the bushing, leaving the inner metal sleeve I’m holding in the picture along with one of the ends of the bolts I ended up torching off. The rest of the bolt is still stuck inside the bushing, never to come out.

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-Dan