Forester front end bushes.... DIY ???

SKT · Post by **SKT** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:28 pm

Heya all. I've been out and about a fair bit of late doing some fairly demanding offroad work with fairly hefty loads and am starting to hear some pretty serious knocking going on. I've had a a few things done lately including new CVs up front and the guys doing my work seem to think everything is looking ok. The car has doen about 180,000K and I would be shy to look at doing all my front end bushes and other bits & bobs that flog out.

I guess I could start with the usual spots and work through slowly eliminating the knocks and creask as I go. I've heard stuff like this before and its been ball-joints and that sort of thing but having a limited knowledge of whats under there and what tends to wear I wouldnt really know where to start.

Can anyone give me a fairly comprehensive idea of what I am looking at as a sensible place to start and how difficult these sort of maintenance tasks would be?

vincentvega · Post by **vincentvega** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 5:01 pm

So far my car has done:

control arm bushes: Just replace these with lom km ones off a front cut. These are a bolt in job. Just make sure you nip the main nut up with the wheels on the ground so the bush is located at the center of wheel travel.

swaybar bushes: These are a consumable on a lifted car. I am on my 3rd set. bolt in job.

steering rack ends: I have always had a knock in the front end of my car but it was never bad enough to find it. Cape york sorted that out.. 1 million corrugations later its pretty obvious my rack ends are flogged out.

In the rear end I have done swaybar link bushes as they were all cracked (think I did them up too tight when i lifted the car) and the bushes on my tailshaft center bearing. but you wont have these. They designed them out in later models.