Bumping this as this was the best thread I could find on this subject. Bought a used shock that came from a RM so I needed to get these out. Spoiler, it was a complete nightmare.
But I got some tips here. I started trying to pull out the sleeves without getting the bearings out. This was impossible without the RM special tool. So I followed the tip from above and got a cheapo blind bearing puller from Amazon. I don't know if this would have been a walk in the park with a quality puller, but this turned out to take some hours. It slipped out without moving it one mm. I went up a size and forced in a larger size puller, and after many attempts and a heatgun I got the bearing to the edge, but beyond that point I could not get it out anymore. After twenty attempts I gave up and changed strategy. The gap allowed me to easily saw off the sleeve behind the bearing. With one bearing out the other one was easy to get out with a hammer and a punch.
But the sleeves turned out to be pretty much stuck, as it turned out they were not inserted with any grease. Tried the puller, but the slide hammer was either not heavy enough or it was just way too stuck. In the end the gap between the sleeves was enough to get a screwdriver in there and punch out one sleeve. Fortunately the goods of the sleeve is quite thick, so I could do it without damaging the shock eyelet.
Long story short; if this happened again I would just dremel or saw one sleeve off and punch out the sawed off sleeve with a screwdriver. This would be a 10 minute job, not an entire evening. If you have a better blind bearing puller and the sleeves were inserted with grease you might be lucky.
