[AFB24911S]

MORE PROGRESS! Hope you're going well, Solamar. Here are some more notes:

Elephant Racing Poly Bronze Bushing Install

These bushings are so neat. They're a lot of work though. The first thing I almost messed up was putting the silver parts onto the spring plate. After giving those a thorough scrub with wire brushes and smoothing them with sandpaper to remove all the leftover rubber, I decided I wanted to paint the spring plate to prevent future corrosion. The Elephant Racing instructions suggest plating, but I thought that might be overkill and that it might impact my splines and the OD of the cylindrical part. My spring plates are the two-piece type, with an adjustment for height, so I had to take it apart to paint the whole piece properly. Those two nuts holding them together are TIGHT, clamp the heck out of the plate and just go to town with the breaker bars.

I masked off the surfaces where the silver, inner parts of the bushings would go and painted each piece. Then, I mixed up my JB weld and applied a thin film to the spring plate and slid the silver part on. Done? I thought so, but I pulled the silver piece off just to make sure. Glad I did, because the interior only had a little JB weld on it. So, I slathered the spring plates with JB weld and pushed the silver pieces on until some squeezed out of the top and bottom, cleaned the parts that shouldn't get JB weld, and reinstalled and repeated until the plate part came away clean and the cylinder part stayed coated. Decided to let it all cure with a little weight on each silver piece pressing them towards the plate part just to be sure.

The most time-intensive part was shaving down the metal on the car surrounding the bushing; there was a lot of excess slag there, and it took me about 2 hours with a Dremel to get the surface perfectly flat. I used one of the polybronze bushings to check flatness as I worked.

When I went to install the bushings, I expected a hard fight to push them into the car and into the spring plate cover, but they slid right in. Not good. The Elephant Racing instructions said to put "Loctite PL-S30" adhesive caulk in the void, so I globbed as much in as I could and cleaned the bearing surfaces afterwards. To adhere them in the correct orientation, I applied the caulking to both at the same time and installed the spring plate between the bushings without any spacers. I eyeballed the alignment at each of the four bolts to get it straight enough, and tightened.

After waiting 24 hours for a good, full cure I disassembled everything and put spacers back in to meet the 1.5mm +/- .75. DONE! Lots more work than rubber bushings, but hopefully the work will pay off in handling and ride quality.

Trailing Arm Bushings

Get. A. Helper. Even if you're taking the arm out of the car, it really helps to have someone help lift it off your chest and brace it when you're working on it. It's a big, heavy piece of aluminum with delicate things like bearings and spindles that you don't want to ding.

I decided to use both of Elephant Racing's tools for this job, and I just don't see how it could be done without them if you want to leave the arm in the car. They ruled. I had my axle out to replace the CV joints anyway, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have swung the arm far enough toward the rear of the car with them on so I advise removing them even if they don't need service.

First, I removed all four of the bolts holding the trailing arm to the spring plate. Once I knuckle-busted the nut and bolt toward the transmission that holds the bushings and the arm in place (3/4" wrench on the nut, 7/8" wrench on the bolt head in my car), I swung it out and down under the transmission subframe mount thing. D'OH! That's heavy! To avoid over-straining the brake lines I left in place, I hip-thrusted the trailing arm to hold it up while on my back and pulled a nut and bolt to myself with a leg. Then, hips supporting the trailing arm, I got the bolt through the trailing arm and the spring plate to hold it in place. Tightened the nut down, and it was in place. PHEW! No damage to brake lines. I suspect a similar procedure could not be performed supporting the trailing arm with the shock absorber, it doesn't look like there's enough room to swing the arm back far enough, but I'm open to being proven wrong.

The old bushings came out easily enough. I heated them for about 3 minutes, and stopped because they started smoking. Then, I wrenched them out with a flat head screw driver and used the removal tool to take the cups out. It worked like a charm, EXACTLY like the Elephant Racing video shows. (There has been much discussion about whether replacing these bushings is a worthwhile service; the rubber in mine was cracking and had flowed significantly, but I don't know how drastically they impact performance. It stands to reason that the rubber would fail entirely and cause metal-on-metal contact, but who knows how long that would take.)

But here's where it got challenging. After I used the installation tool to put the new bushings on, they were too wide to fit in the opening. I thought I must not have installed them fully, so I used the tool again and held the trigger down on my 18V impact wrench until the driver stopped rotating on each side. Again, no joy on attempted fitment. I measured: my opening was 55 mm wide, and my bushings were 57.5 mm wide. Thinking I still hadn't tightened enough and that my impact wrench was not enough, I got out my breaker bars and went to town with the installation tool. I got the bushings to 57.1 mm wide by hand. So, I used my hydraulic floor jack to put more force on my breaker bars than I could by hand. Doing that pressed the inner metal part out of the outer metal. OOPS. Put the tool on the other side and repeated the process with the floor jack, same result, but at least now I figured I had gotten them as far in as they'd go. Again, 57.1 mm. So, I removed the big cylindrical parts from the installation tool, put the nuts and the washers back on, and squeezed the bushings just enough to make them 54.9 mm thick. That'll fit! I had to adjust the tool so that the nut facing the transmission was even with the all-thread to swing the arm around the frame and into place, but it fit right in. I took the nuts and washers off by hand, removed the all-thread, and pushed the bushings and arm into place. DONE!

After my boneheaded move with the hip thrust to hold the trailing arm up, I got a second pair of hands to help put a bolt in and tighten a nut down on all the future attempts. Definitely get a helper, invaluable.

Now all that's left for me is to get my new CV joints, put the axle back together and in, put in the new strut, torque everything, and then it'll just be the brakes left to bleed. I've been cleaning everything to death as I go while waiting for rust remover or paint to dry, but I think I have about 20 or 30 hours into this corner so far. I bet I can do the opposite side in 15.

Here's where I reveal myself as a millennial: if you want to follow along, I'm saving videos of the work on Instagram. I'm @BWW428CobraJet there. If I'm feeling up to it on the other side, I'll film and edit the process on the other side (editing would be the hard part, don't even know what software I'd use).