Anti Roll Bar agony

[cal44]

Two months ago I used the vise to do this....it works, but what a pain. I'll never do that again. I will make a tool. A couple of steel plates, nuts and bolts, a couple of sockets the appropriate size and some goose grease. Get er' done..........

After making a suspension bushing tool from all thread, nuts, washers and some patience.........a tool for the bushing for the sway bar next. It's a waste of time trying muscle this stuff when a simple tool can be made.

mike

[BullAndrew]

After skinning knuckles and making little progress with what I thought was going to be quite simple I referred to the community to see what the experience and solution was.

After reading several other posts I went with the following.

1) Boil water, make a mug of tea and take a second mug of boiling water out to that garage with me
2) Pop the first bush in to the mug of water
3) Clamp ARB in the vice at about the right place for the link to be
4) Hook the bush out of the mug and drop the other bush in
5) A good squirt of washing up liquid and push the bush on to the ARB up to the vice
6) A bit more washing up liquid over the bush and push the drop link onto the bar and bush
7) repeat steps 3 to 6 for the other side NOTE just make sure the drop links are the right way round.

Only problem, this was so successful and so quick I still skinned my knuckles as I punched the vice as it all went on so easy and very quick. now I only need to clean up the paint where I messed it up the other evening.

A great example as the wisdom of the site solves yet another problem

Andrew

[billwill]

[CBUEB1771]

I found that on my +2 the two flattened ends are not the same width. It made the job much easier to install both drop links over the more narrow end.

[elanner]

I've been rebushing/cleaning/painting my front suspension. The ARB bushes had shrunk to the point where you could see daylight alongside the bar, and were squidgy - so the bar was very loose.

Anyway, on reading all the threads in the forum about fitting the ARB bushes it's clear that most people put the bush in the drop link and then jam the drop link over the end of the bar and around the bend. This approach obviously works, but I wasn't confident that I could do it and worried that I would end up with the link and bush jammed immovably somewhere along the bar. Also, despite the ends of my bar being reasonably rounded, I found that one of the old bushes had been torn internally, presumably while being fitted using the bush-in-link method.

So I took cal44's advice and decided to make a tool to squeeze the drop link onto the bush. Essentially it is a much simplified version of the tool shown in Brian Buckland's book. Pictures below - as you can see, it is of very crude construction. But, using plenty of washing up liquid, the drop link squeezed over the bush quite easily.

Of course, making the tool took a lot longer than fitting the drop links.

Nick

[h20hamelan]

could not find the tool I made 10 years ago. think it was my first job on this car

very simple with the groove/channel lock

[Foxie]

<Snip>

Alternatively, consider fitting a spyder unit which has easy to change drop links..

Jeremy

Not only is the Spyder A/R bar easy to fit, but the adjustable links allow the bar to neutrally match the left-to-right suspension height settings.