Were is a good spot to jack up the car in the rear for installing springs? Is the L shaped guard over the axel ok to use? And where to put the jack stands? These unibody cars can be tempermental.

 

i thought the little triangle cutouts in the lower plastic were the jack indicators.....

 

Yep, the triangle cutouts point the jacking points.

If you are going to use jack stands though, I would think that you would need to jack the car up some other way and put the jack stands where the triangle cutouts point to.

Here is a quote from Snoopy on it:

 

Better check the manual before doing anything.
You may find the jackstand coming through the cargo floor. The HHR is not the sturdiest built car.

 

I was originally thinking that I could use the rear suspension mounts, but I have the Progress sway bar installed.

Is there a good point on the rear that I can use to jack it up so that I can position the jack stands at the actual jacking point (flange) as shown in the owners manual?

 

Lee showed us a good place to put jack stands in the back in his leveling spring thread.

It's the front end that I am having great difficulty with (I need to get the beast up on 4 jack stands to rotate the tires).

I have pictures of someones HHR (white with red brake calipers) on my hard drive and it looks like they used the area on the front end just to the back of the wheelwell on the underside (has two holes in it). I tried using those and it looked like the metal was starting to bend so I stopped.

My hydraulic jack has a lift height if 14" but I couldn't raise the HHR high enough to put the jack stand under the subframe mount on the front end.

Needless to say this is really ticking me off

Is the subframe mount the only place on the front end to put the jack stands?

 

Black Rose said "It's the front end that I am having great difficulty with (I need to get the beast up on 4 jack stands to rotate the tires)."

With 1 jack and 2 stands, I've found that the easiest solution was to break out the spare and use that. Jack 1 corner, put the spare on (only used 3 lugs), go to the next... keep going... Not too bad.

 

^^^^ In most cases, me too.

It also allows a check of the air pressure in the spare....which most people forget.

 

Use the jack stands on the front then jack the back up one side at a time. If you jack it up and lay down and look under there you can see where to put the jack stands where they will do no harm.

 

Jack up one rear side and put it on a stand. Remove tire. Jack up same side front wheel and remove replacing with tire from back. Jack up other back tire replacing it with front just removed. Jack up remaining front and put on tire just removed. Put the tire from the front on back and take off stand. One stand, one jack is all you need. Crossed the fronts to back and backs straight up to front. Simple.

If you have directional tires then do not cross just swap backs to front. This will require two stands and a jack. Really cannot imagine directionals on this car though. Waste of money.