Well I have 3 a arms with bad bushings, has anyone tried the urethane instead of replacing the a arms?

 

Yes, I have been happy with them so far. I got the orange poly bushes from british4x4outfitters.com

They are a bugger to retrofit, had to use a sawsall and air hammer. There is a company though that makes a really neat set of tools to remove the old bushings.

The brand I went with are Polybush are the world leader in Polyurethane Suspension Bushes and Components. - Polybush

 

I'd love to hear more about how these perform, unseen. In the past the orange ones were impossible to source and people who went with the red ones reported some issues with the suspension. If I recall, they were getting traction control engagements at unexpected times and stuff like that.

 

I agree, the orange were originally impossible to source, and the red ones sucked, extremely difficult to assemble, etc. The Orange ones from Josh worked out really well. They come with metal inserts or sleeves and can be assemble by hand once you have the old bushings out. This should prevent the sticking that caused the problems we originally heard about.

I Just did an off road event for 3 days, and had no suspension faults for the first time in years. They are a hair firmer than the oil filled originals, but it is not bad enough to complain. If they outlast the OEM then I will be happy.

I have only done the front lowers so far, as that's all that were bad at the time, I figured they take the worst bearing, and also most directly effect the ride. Like I say, they have been worthwhile so far, and I plan to change out the rest of them at some point. It is probably worthwhile doing the whole set, or at least getting the whole set so you have them on hand.

 

Sweet. I never pulled the trigger on these...I put so few miles on mine each year that 50k miles out of the OE bushings takes me about ten years to achieve. That's a decent enough service life for me to just keep 'em.

 

Thanks, I am gonna see if the arms are good on the parts truck if not I will be going this route

 

Well I too the dive and ordered the poly bushings from lucky 8 , I will try to do a tutorial for these when I do them

 

I will say so far this is the worse suspension I have ever worked on so far we have like 3.5 hours into 1 front upper a arm to remove do bushings and reinstall, oh and I snapped the ball joint off so I am guessing the a arm will need to come off again to replace it, ugh

 

Tom I appreciate that you're doing this for the remainder of the 3 community

Keep at it!

 

I'll guess the trouble you're having is due to being from the rust belt. (east coast)

I replaced all my bushings with orange poly last winter. The only difficulty was trying to juggle the arms in place on the press to get the old bushings out. On some of them I just gave up since there was no way I was going to fit the thing in the press. On those I drilled a bunch of holes around the bushing body then shoved the 'guts' out of it. Then I used a sawzall to slice the remaining steel sleeve then just knocked it out with a hammer and punch. All four corners plus the anti-roll bar bushes took a day.

Oh, and you can change a ball joint without taking the arm off, it's just a little harder to juggle the tool. I've used a simple HF ball joint press to do it on the truck. And I'm not impressed with some of the ball joints - I snapped a brand new one when installing it. I shouldn't have been able to do that with a simple 12" ratchet and not that much effort. That was an 'OEM' part from AB as I recall.