It was not bad, took me maybe six hours to do both. I removed the tie rod end and the upper ball joint. Not too bad a job, you have to make sure the brake hose does not get strained; some people remove the caliper and hang it out of the way to avoid this threat. As mentioned above, one of the hardest parts is getting the nut off the end of the old shock. This nut is buried in the spring structure, so a socket is needed to get to it (at least on mine as the whole area was rusted, so an open end wrench did not grip the nut well enough). I inserted a socket on the nut and gripped it with vice grips and then was able to hold the shaft with a small socket through the one holding the nut. A pain, but it worked. I suppose the whole nut and shock end could be ground out if they are too rusted together; thankfully I did not have to do that. The next hard part was getting the bolt through the bottom mounting point on the shock and through the lower control arm, it did not line up very well, so I had to use a bottle jack to push the bolt up while pounding it in, this worked fine and was not too bad. Swapping the coils over was easy enough with spring compressors.
