My new struts are scheduled to be delivered this evening, so to prepare for their arrival I have removed (per Wayne's write up) the interior panels. Removal of the panels and struts were pretty easy. I only wish I had done this years ago. Would have prevented a dozen or so bumps on the head. The only difference for me from the Pelican tech article was that all the Torx screws were size 25. No biggie.
Below is my solution to support the back hatch. By Parking in the garage head first, I was able to use the handle of the garage door as a connection point to put bungee cords on the hatch to support it. The beauty of this system is that when I need to slightly move the hatch to reconnect the strut I will have several inches of play as I simply need to pull on the hatch and the bungee cords will give a little. After I took this photo I modified my system from the one you see below. What I did was use two different bungee cords to loop through the handle and connect onto the lip of the bottom edge of the hatch. The hook of the bungee cord connects easily and securely and this way should one bungee cord fail I will have the second as a back up.
