Rory

So I am sitting here looking at some poly control arm bushings which do not come with the metal sleeves or washers. The replacements consist of ONLY the urethane piece and the original bushings are incased in metal, pressed in, etc.

4WD IFS 1991 22RE

Found a bunch of the same bushings for sale on here actually....

Not my truck, otherwise I would have already chucked em. But its torn down in my garage so lets say I'm commited.

According to the instructions I am supposed to extract the rubber from the bushings while keeping all the metal intact. As in NOT pressing the bushings out, splitting off the washers, sliding out the inner sleeve, and removing the rubber from the outer sleeve without removing it from the arm.

!!!!????!!!!

Is this even possible? My first thought was to throw the arms in a fire, let it burn off all the rubber, then squezing the poly ones in. Guess then the arm would have to be sanded and painted.. Thats not a viable solution.

I did a search and didn;t find anyhing after an hour. Anyone done this before? Should I tell this guy his more than a hundred dollars poly bushings all the way around kit was a waste of money????

Help.

jmach1

When I put my Chaos front end on, I also was confused. But since I did not need my stock control arms I put the sawzall to them and cut it all off. When i did have the stock control arms we just sat around with beer and burnt the old ones out with a torch. It stunk but it did work. We did finally get the new polyeurathane bushings in and to tell you the truth, the only thing I noticed was that when it got cold out my truck squeeked horribly.
I felt the same way you did when I did that same project.
Good Luck.

Needeep

Not to ruin your thread or anything, but I too didn't find anything on replacing bushings.

What poly bushing kit did you use? I am looking at doing the same thing and was this the only issue you ran across when changing out all the bushings?

Rory

Hmm. I do have a torch. Maybe fire WILL work. Yeah I found nothing about installing poly urethane bushings, but I found a lot of people unhappy about the squeaking. I found two people selling the kit the guy gave me, thats a testamonial right there. Both adds were like "I bought them and didn't need them". More like didn't want them.

I seem to have come to the conclusion that poly urethane bushings work pretty great on a race car. I can't seem to understand the need for them in off-road applications.

TNRabbit

Polyurethane is firmer than rubber, thereby reducing the flexation and improving reaction time, which you want in a race car, but do NOT want off road. Sorry, man. Good Luck getting rid of them....

05prerunner

i torch em out, works fine but i agree with Rabbit, rubber is better offroad

Rory

Actually thats pretty much what we did. On the Upper ones a little bit of drilling works great too, as long as you miss the metal. So last night we changed all of them. Lubed them up real good and told the owner "they will squeak". I think he was choosing them for longevity. I have access to a press though so I think I would just replace the stock ones with more stock ones as they wear out. Hell if I still had my air hammer I bet it would run em out and in pretty good.

In the end though I am sad that I have seen so many people reccommend these poly bushings on their websites, in their personal opinions.... (this is my first lift, I mainly deal with sports cars) One look at em for me and my reaction is "I can't believe they actually sell these!" I think part of why they squeak so bad is that you are using the old hardware, and even though its a tight fit, they werern't made to stay put, they twist in their sleeves. Seems like the original ones were made into the metal, stayed in place and just twisted. If there was a full poly bushing made into the metal I would be interested to try it.

Something else I found out I am not very impressed with: spindle drop-down lift brackets. Doesn't this drasticly alter the suspension geometry?

Rory

Sorry I didn't see this question. It is an "Energy Suspension" Full polyurethane bushing set, it has em for the rear leafs, the front control arms, and the sway bar.

Just remember poly urethane, good for race car, bad for off road rig. But for a body lift polyurethane would be GREAT.

Yes this was the only issue we had. Of course the control arms aren't back on the truck yet so...