Rear Suspension Upgrades

[rubio9800]

Hello everyone,

I have an 81 GP, and have been making small upgrades.

Car is not high performance , just for cruising. I've lowered it by 2" and have a rear sway bar, all from UMI performance
Bilstein shocks/struts

Would there be any benefit replacing rear upper/lower control arms (tubular)?

i would imagine the rubber bushings are stock and i've seen some to have cracks all around. don't know if they were ever replaced

thanks

 

[Clone TIE Pilot]

The stock rear suspension arms are designed to flex to prevent binding, especially the uppers. If you have to go with boxed or tubular arms, go with arms that have ball poly joints. Stay away from poly suspension bushings.

 

[84dragcutlass]

If you've gotten all your stuff from UMI look at the line of rear control arms they have. Get the non adjustable upper and lower with the roto joints to keep the suspension bind free and you'll be good to go.

 

[bracketchev1221]

Welding some plates on the bottom side of the arms and replacing the bushings helps. Back in the early 90’s that’s how i did it when nothing was avaialbale.

 

[rubio9800]

thank you all for the feedback, i will go with the roto joints.
Bushings on the rear end are for sure messed up.

Should i go with rubber ones? poly? anyone have recommendations?

 

[64nailhead]

Unless your bushings are worn out, in which case they should be replaced anyway, you'll get much more bang for your buck with front and rear sway bars. Perhaps you already have stock sway bars, which work quite well. But if you bought the large diameter sway bars, then you would notice a marked improvement.

 

[rubio9800]

Unless your bushings are worn out, in which case they should be replaced anyway, you'll get much more bang for your buck with front and rear sway bars. Perhaps you already have stock sway bars, which work quite well. But if you bought the large diameter sway bars, then you would notice a marked improvement.

yes, they look pretty worn out, i didnt take them out but for what i can see, cracked all over

i have the front stock sway bar plus GP Bar. I do plan to upgrade the front one eventually
rear sway bar is aftermarket

 

[abbey castro]

IMO: i had the poly bushings all around. Creaked all the time, harsh ride. If you are only going to street drive get MOOG replacement bushings.

 

[rubio9800]

thanks for the tips,
i'll go with the Moogs

 

[scoti]

About using poly bushings....

I'm a Chevy C10 guy & have done suspension work on @ least a dozen early truck-arm set-ups. Back in the day I had one of my trucks apart making some changes & decided to put new bushings in the arms (rear T/A's). Unfortunately, I could not get any stock style rubber bushings & had to use poly; specifically Energy Suspension brand. I swapped them in & rolled w/it. After some time on the road the creaking started. Trying to lube them didn't seem to make any impact as they'd start making noises again (you usually would hear it when doing the turn-in to a different height entrance/driveway etc). The truck was only on the road w/that set-up from '99 -'05 before things were changed/upgraded again.

I still had/have the arms since they're good for mocking things up. A guy on one of my other forums needed some info earlier this week so I pulled them out from storage to click off a few pics for him. I was not expecting the shape they were in. The feel can be described as like touching driveway/side-walk concrete. <6yrs of limited service life (3k miles a year?) & stored indoors since....

I would try to find something w/spherical joints or Delrin if feeling the need to upgrade over new rubber bushings.