Once again, I had problems with my rear lower control arms. The bushings got worn after one year (yeah, my wife uses the accelerator of the crd like a switch stressing the s***t out of the diff bushing/dampers). I purchased another control arm to have a spare one (150$ can) to mess around with. Same rubber so same thing will happen to it soon. I wanted urethane bushings for this special area, especially with the torque of the CRD when the turbo kicks in. Of course, no commercially available high performance bushings for this area. My wife is pregnant and soon I won't have much time to improve the truck. Already I'm waiting for my OME suspension and it will take about a week to complete (installation, alignment). So, purchasing the new bushings was useless and nothing better on the market. I searched the web and found out about bushing hardness (expressed in shore) and I saw a guy making polyurethane bushings with urethane used to make pottery mold. That's when I discovered Smooth-on products. They have a lot of stuff that could be useful for our trucks. Plastics epoxy, rubber, urethanes, gasket making rubber, here's a few ideas:
http://www.smooth-on.com/gallery.php?galleryid=258&cPath=1275. I'm not linked with this company in any ways. I just work in aerospace where we have a lot of interesting products that you usually can't find in commercial retail. This company got a lot of good products for us. So far, it looks good for the bushing. I removed all the rubber using a bell saw and the dremel, made a mold at one end using play-do and poored the mix in there. I'm waiting for it to cure right now. Much easier than to find a press to remove the bushing and put it back with the same low quality stealership crap. Hopefully, it will work, otherwise, I will redo it again. A control arm bushing goes for 50$ can at the dealer (18usd at alj, about 50us for 2 with shipping) you need to pay for somebody to press it in or beg to somebody and in the end, you're not satisfied. I guess only time will tell about durability but it's promising! Plastic epoxy can find good applications also. There's also a guy that made a rubber gasket that could be a good application for differential or transmission
http://www.smooth-on.com/gallery.php?galleryid=114&cPath=1275. Have fun and let me know what you fabricate with this good stuff.
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