Here you can see I have a start at going around the crimp with the punch for the first time. I found several round trips around was necessary, and angling the punch inwards to dig the corner in deeper and apply some inward pressure on the lip of steel insert, to get the desired noticeably increase binding action I was looking for on the spherical bearing.
I stopped hammering when there was a moderately noticeably increase bind on the spherical bearing, because I wanted to tighten it up, give the joint was already "broken in", I didn't want it to bind as hard as a brand new trailing arm. (I understand they are difficult to even move by bare hands). I found it took quite a lot of hammering action to accomplish this - hard blows delivered multiple times around the crimp. No need to be shy here! Just make sure the punch, and support on the back side are all in the right spot before you hit with that sledge.
Here's what the tightened up joint looks like:
Once you've got your re-lubricated, tightened up joint, you'll want to replace the boots and clips. I found reinstalling inner spirolox clip to be the most difficult, and ended up vice-gripping each end of the spirolox, and rotating the spiral open larger, then installing over the receiving rubber groove, before releasing the vice grips while guiding the spirolox into the target rubber groove with a small screwdriver. (..whew - a lot of monkey business to reinstall those spirolox!). Re-installing the outer circlips with the earlier shown pliers on the other hand, was a piece of cake.
Re-install both of your freshly rebuilt trailing arms, and as stated in the other linked threads above. torque those retaining fasteners (both front and rear) to the spec of 118 ft-lbs.
In my opinion, you shouldn't worry about pre-loading the suspension (as it makes no difference with spherical bearings anyway), reinstall the rear under-car shield with the 10mm plastic nuts, and enjoy your new quiet ride! Suspension alignment shouldn't be affected through this.
One cautionary warning on this noise fix, as others have reported when replacing the arms with new, is once this obnoxious source of noise has been taken care of, you may start hearing some other, more quiet noises. (However, I assure you, taking care of these obnoxious noises is still worth it, and also as I hope you've learned in this thread, needn't require you to fork over hundreds of $ on new, unnecesssry replacement parts, either)!
Cheers!