I have attached a bunch of photos of the new pins and bushings and the old pins and bushings.
The small rubber part is the heart of an OEM bushing with the inner and outer metal sleeves removed. There is not a whole lot there!
The Firmfeel design appears to work with the pin rotating on the bushing so that the bushing is acting more as a bearing than a bushing. The new bushing is made of a very very firm material and has grooves the length of the bushing, presumably for grease. The nut end of the pin has a grease fitting and there is a channel maybe 1/8" diameter through the center of the pin leading to two small holes under the bushing to allow additional grease to be added to the bushing after installation.
You need to have the outer steel shell of the original lower control arm bushing still in the lower control arm for the Firmfeel bushings to fit. Also, if you wanted to try these bushings with OEM pins you would have to have the inner steel shell of the lower control arm bushing installed on the OEM pin. I am not sure if this would be a good idea because you could not grease the bushings after installation. It also means that the greasable pins will not work with OEM bushings unless you remove the inner steel shell which also does not seem to be a great idea.
I just wanted to share what I have learned so far in case anyone else was thinking about these greasable lower control arm pins.
This car has just about all that Firmfeel has to offer in the way of suspension and steering upgrades. Front and rear sway bars, 1.12" torsion bars, Bilestein shocks, tubular upper control arms with polyurethane bushings, heavy duty strut rod with polyurethane bushings, stage 2 rebuilt steering gear box. The car also has four wheel disc brakes and a rear springs from a 72 New Yorker.
I figured that it was worth giving these pins/bushings a try since if they are appropriate for any C-body, it would be one with all the modifications on this car.
Joined: Sat Aug 19 2006, 05:03PM
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gregcon wrote ...
I like Firm Feel but I think that whole setup is wrong in many ways.....
Out of curiosity, what are the many ways?
One I can think of is the possibility of the pin "walking" out of the bushing. There are other components such as the strut rod that help to locate the LCA to prevent that of course.
Joined: Wed Aug 11 2010, 10:15AM
Location: E WA
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Mike66Chryslers wrote ...
gregcon wrote ...
I like Firm Feel but I think that whole setup is wrong in many ways.....
Out of curiosity, what are the many ways?
One I can think of is the possibility of the pin "walking" out of the bushing. There are other components such as the strut rod that help to locate the LCA to prevent that of course.
The torsion bar also helps locate the lower control arm right behind the pin. Greasing this bushing will also grease the LCA end of the torsion bar if that is worth anything?
Joined: Thu Mar 01 2007, 09:30PM
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The walking is one concern, and the T-bar has plenty of axial free-float; it's not gonna offer much in the way of prevention.
Another is the fact that you've turned a flex bushing into a free-rotation bearing. I'd bet $100 that a Chrysler suspension engineer could show you a calculation of why the bushing was more than ample for that service but that size of a bearing is not. What I mean is that as a flex bushing, the entire bushing is seeing load as the arm moves through its arc of travel. As a bearing that spins, only a portion of one side is really loaded. I'd bet that if Chrysler had for some reason designed it as a bearing it would have been way bigger. Especially in the 'lengthwise' direction. It's a pretty stubby bearing considering what it's doing. But then, I'm sure that why it wasn't designed that way to start with.
Then, it also will change the way the arm responds to any input. That could be good or bad but without testing it I don't know.
As I've noted before on other threads, I'm not big on any of the urethane bushing aftermarket setups when it comes to anything other than bump stops and sway bar end uses.
Look under any production Viper or Corvette or Ferrari and you won't see urethane...you'll see bushings much like millions of other cars used going back to the 50's. Flex type.