Bushing trouble – and success

[Erling]

With the help from my son (bonding!), I replaced the rear trailing arm bushings on his 245 last Saturday. Both bushings were more worn than I had expected. The bolt tubes were no longer parallel to the shell, which made it difficult to distribute an even pressure when using The Tool*) to press the bushings out. Still, one of them came out fairly easily - well, as easy as trailing arm bushings go. The other one though... After lots of trial and error, moving the tool around, the bushing still did not want to come out sideways but tended to work its way upwards. When I poked at what I believed was a lump of underbody coating on the top of the bushing, it turned out it was the shell folding up on the inside of one of the brackets. We were crushing the bushing, not pressing it out. Sigh.

I saw no other way out of this than grinding/chiselling/gnawing the bushing out. I mostly used an angle grinder though. Thanks for the small favours, because the oval bushing had moved a millimetre, I was able to rotate it in the brackets so the grinder could access it all the way round the circumference.

I think the main problem was the angled tube inside the bushing, which made the forces go upwards as well as sideways when using The Tool. What I should have done in this case, I think, was to use The Tool to first pull out the tube, using washers as a puller. With the tube out of the way, it would have been easy to get an even pressure all around the edge of the shell. Live and learn.

After quite a bit of hassle we finally had two worn bushings out and two new ones in. And my son has hopefully learned that in repair work, you sometimes have to improvise when things do not go as planned.

Anyway, the car is a lot better to drive with the new bushings. When going around sharp turns, the rear used to do some turning of its own, that's gone now. And the slightly sagging rear end is history too. The 245 seemed to have its original 18 years old bushings with 135,000 miles on them. New bushings made a lot more difference in this car than in my 244 more than a year ago, at 18 years and 94,000 miles.

Mauled bushing:


*) The Tool, made out of 2" plumbing parts:

[Mike_Brace]

Our local garage made up their own tool to attach to the air chisel and so vibrate it out - it seemed to work very well without any distortion problems.

Mike