Here we go - lots of progress this weekend. Starting with the front and rear bumpers. I picked up the rear bumper from the junkyard a few weeks back and installed today.
Pulled and painted the front bumper as well, cool dark gray color matched with one of the rear corner caps. This has 3 coats of paint and 2 coats of 1K clear, but I ran out just before I got through the 2nd coat. Letting this cure for 2 days and then will wet sand, hoping it works but if not will pick up another can of 1K clear and give it another coat.
Next up is all of the lower control arm bushes. These weren’t that hard, had the 20 ton press to assist. Lots of banging as the bushings released from their housings. I did heat them up a bit, but ended up not really needing to… 20 tons of pressure is plenty to get them to come loose. Here’s the box of parts that I ended up pulling, all 4 bushings, cams, and bolts.
Here’s the rear driver control bushing - I’m not putting a lot of pressure on this, and you can see the cracks in the rubber. This was repeated on the passenger side.
I ended up finding that the rear cam on the passenger side was cranked all the way inboard. I fixed that to match up to the driver’s side, which seemed a little more reasonable, and then took it down for another alignment this morning. Caster and camber were spot on, toe was way off so he adjusted that.
Shimmy is still there intermittently, which is really frustrating after all of the suspension bits that I’ve replaced. The only thing left is to replace the sh*tty tires, which is happening next week. BFG A/Ts are on the way. If that doesn’t fix it… I’m guessing I’ll just have to live with it. Or throw more money at the UCA bushes, may just do that anyway for the heck of it.
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