wake

Well, I spent about half the day replacing the sway bar bushings in the rear yesterday... At 63K miles, the upper and lower shackle bushings were really shot...

Anyway, I figured this to be about a 2 hour job... Wrong, 6 hours later I finish (almost)... Whoever at GM that is responsible for the "fun" of working on cars should have his a$$ kicked... Rant Starting....

After getting the rear up and removing the tires I try to remove the shackles to remove and press in the bushings... Well, come t find out that unless I remove the sway bar from the car, then there's no way the top shackle bolt will even come out of the shackle... The bolts were mounted from the inside and hit up against the rear diff carrier where it meets the outside frame... Ok, I after I notice this and pull the spare tire and carrier, loosen the muffler hangers and such, I spend about 30 minutes trying to maneuver the sway bar out....

After I finally get the shackes and the sway bars removed, I noticed that the bolts have loctite on them (good idea), but also that the damn bolts are about an inch longer than they need to be... If they were of propper size then there would be no need to remove the sway bar to remove the shackles... Who's ingenious idea at GM was this???

Removing and pressing in the new bushings was easy of course on 3 of the 4 that I had... Must be murphys law at work here, I spent about 30 minutes on the last one because it wouldn't seat propperly to be pressed in...

Finally it's all back to together... I've got to pull the wheels off again this morning to torque everything to spec... It was pretty late, and I need to check the rear shocks so I just put it back together so I could get it into the garage for the night...

Ok, end of rant...

The bushings on the sway bar and the lower dog bone in front of the rear wheels really "rough" looking, all cracked... The rest of the rear suspension looks fine... I've got 63K miles on the car now and the suspension is starting to feel "old"... She just doesn't handle like she used to...

Maybe I'll work on the suspension a little more before new tires this fall... I gotta wonder though, how hard it would be to remove those dog bones and press new bushings into them...

Moral of the story though... The Helm manual is exactly correct on everything that needed to be done... I sure didn't understand removing the sway bar until I saw that stupid bolt...

h rocks

Good start Wake. Replacing all the bushings will make a world of difference in the handling of the car. Using poly in most areas will help, *without* giving you a harsh ride. One area that I felt *immediate* improvement in was when I replaced the huge diff carrier/third member bushings. Seemed like car was immediately more responsive to steering inputs. I wouldn't go for poly in the front lower swaybar links that are installed in LCA. I re-installed a new set of factory bushings after two track days trashed the cageless polys. There is some debate on poly in the dogbones, but I was not able to see any binding when moving the suspension through it's range of travel though. Generally speaking, poly most everywhere will really tighten things up nicely.

wake

Thanks for the info H Rocks... I plan on staying with the stock rubber bushings on the car... I don't need racetrack performance yet... I just want to make the car feel smooth again and get rid of the slop... I'll look into that carrier bushing... Sounds like a lot of work by the name alone...

My tires have 30K on them now, so I'm sure they're hardening on me too... I do have a slight vibration in the front end, and the tires were rebalanced and I still have the vib... The alignment shop told me that one of the front tires was just "not right", I think the tech meant slightly out of round...

What amazed me though is that some of the bushings still look like new and others are cracked and look ready to fall apart... I guess those are the ones that take the most abuse then...

Jim