I know there are many members that have done this and hopefully didn’t learn how to do it the hard way, I replaced the dog bone bushings and the camber rod.
I guess I made the mistake of taking all three out so I could remove the old and press in the new. I used a large vise and that worked fine. The Super Pro bushings are forgiving when squeezing them in. Much more so than the Prothane bushings for the sway bar end links and bar.
The purpose of this message is to make the first time user aware of how much movement takes place in the knuckle when you take out those 3 bars. The knuckle drops and rotates counter clockwise so much that you can’t get any of the bars back on the knuckle.
You have to jack up the knuckle on the rearward arm to rotate it back clockwise and elevated. I found you have to do this high enough to get the camber bar to line up on both ends, and it will. You will know when the bolts slide back in place.
But this will be too high to get the dog bone bars on the knuckle, so you have to lower it very slowly until both of those line up. Again, by sliding the bolts back in place. I attached both the dog bones to the chassis bracket first so I could see when everything lined up.
That is the order I did it. Not sure if you could do the dog bones first and then the camber bar.
Anyway, I found out the hard way by many attempts.
I hope this helps any member that maybe thinking about this. My 1996, 48K miles definitely needed new bushings. I highly recommend the Super Pro. But as many have said, buy extra bushing grease, you will need it.

 

I dropped the whole rear suspension when I replaced my OEM bushings with Superpro. Spare tire, exhaust, driveshaft, rear suspension, all of it came out. Since these cars are 30 years old now, everything is suspect. I found the same thing as yours-80k miles and my bushings were gone, especially the sway bar bushings. I ended up replacing the tie rod end links, the pads on the vertical leafspring bolt asm's, and the U-Joints for the driveshaft and half shafts. It needed it. Not one u joint was unscathed from heat damage, or seal failure, some ends had missing grease. I ended up taking the whole assembly to a shop for new diff oil and a silicon seal on the lid since the gaskets aren't available anymore. I also replaced every suspension bushing with superpros, and energy suspension for the sway bar bushings. The OEM were half torn on both sides. I don't recommend leaving the rear suspension in while doing this type of work. Drop it all and give it a good onceover. When putting it back together, I installed the camber bars loosely, and then jacked up the knuckle to get the dogbones to line up with the mounts, since the leafspring is in tension at installed position.

 

That is what I should have done. That is good advise for sure. I just didn’t think I was up to it, so I thought I was taking the easy way out. I have the SuperPro bushings for the Batwing, but I didn’t do them. I imagine I will have to do it all at some point. The Batwings bushes didn’t look bad, but you are right. While you are at it do it all and be done with it.
I priced out all the Spicer U-joints and will do those when I do the Batwing.
Thanks for your reply.

 

Oh its not a simple job that is for sure. The batwing bushings are the most difficult of all the suspension bushings. I did do them all on my car. You not only have to press out the big rubber bushing, which is hard as a rock and solidified to the mount like concrete, but the metal sleeve insert between the rubber and the batwing itself. It is directional on removal, it looks like the end of a trumpet. I resorted to a metal hand saw and took two cuts to remove a lengthwise chunk of it, then I crushed the insert to remove the rest of the tension and it came out. It took awhile. The install was real easy for the new superpro's. I used a press/pull sleeve kit off amazon. BTW, it took me a year to do it all, between the front bushings, ball joints, end links, all shocks, and the rear work as I described. It's worth it, even though the job is tedious. It changes the feeling of the whole car-its hard to put into words, but smoothness and refinement are the only ones I can come up with. I was impressed with the difference. I did lose some "feel"-there is some vagueness now in the steering and seat of the pants where I could feel everything that the tires were doing-but the ride quality is so much improved that it makes up for it.