Rear Sway Bar Bushing Replacement

The following is what I did to replace the old, stock rear sway bar bushings with the Energy Suspension bushings. This took approximately 4 hours for a first-timer, not counting the barbeque break.

Tools:

-car ramps

-Arbor press (mine is from Harbor Freight and cost less than $200)

-4” 2-jaw heavy duty gear puller (this was about $15 at AutoZone, Ampro model T74163)

-Metric sockets, ratchet and wrenches

-1/2” chisel, decent-sized flat blade screwdriver, and hammer

-Metal bristle brush

-Pliers and vice grips

-Charcoal

Process:

I backed the car onto the ramps and set the e-brake (car in park or 1^st gear).

I did NOT grab a camera and take some pictures of the whole thing before I started pulling it apart, but you SHOULD! Don’t end up like me, trolling the used car lots in town looking for an intact Cruiser to snap a couple of pictures.

I removed the four bolts holding the sway bar to the car (2 on the twist beam rear axle, one each behind the rear wheels).

I took a socket and removed the nuts holding the end links to the sway bar. Be careful you don’t pinch yourself as the head of the bolt has a flange that keeps it from turning more than about 350 degrees.

I took a hammer and screwdriver and bent the tab on the metal piece holding the sway bar cushions in order to get them apart:

NOTE: I took this picture after I replaced this bushing just for illustration.

I separated the two metal pieces and had my helper clean off all the surfaces that touch the bushing.

The original bushing is split and can be wrestled off. However, the new one must slide on from the end of the sway bar. This wasn’t too difficult. I probably should have cleaned the part of the sway bar that the bushing was traveling over.

Just before the bushing gets to where it needs to be, I grabbed a craft stick (popsicle stick) and dabbed some of the grease that Energy provides onto the sway bar where the bushing is to sit. The bushing will push most of this aside, so I made sure that most of the grease I put on was located so the bushing would push it into the area that needed it.

I used paper towels to keep the grease from making a huge mess.

I put the metal pieces back together, clamped them carefully with some vice grips about where the bolt is supposed to pass through them, and then used the hammer to bend the tabs back into place.

I was about 1/3 of the way done at this point.

I grabbed one of the end links and started pulling the end link bushings from the end-link itself:

NOTE: this is another picture I took after the replacement, just to help me illustrate. The jaws of the puller need to grab the edge of the end link (the black painted steel part in the picture). The old bushings usually left a nice gap that the jaws fit into. When it didn’t, I just squeezed the jaws into the rubber a bit to try to get them to grab the metal end link before turning the screw. I put a washer between the gear puller screw and the rubber bushing and pushed everything out of the end link at once.

The gear puller flops around a bit until you get it set and start turning the screw, so an extra set of hands was helpful. I just turned the screw with a socket on a short ratchet and it pushed right out.

The bushings I just pushed out are actually two pieces. One is metal and the other is rubber, and they are NOT coming apart easily! Tell yourself you’re half way done, and grab the chisel and hammer:

NOTE: Once again, this picture was taken afterwards. The rubber bushing will be hugging that metal spacer for all it’s worth! I used the chisel as shown and hit it with a hammer a few times to slice the rubber bushing from top to bottom.

I then grabbed a small screwdriver (a smaller chisel would have worked too), and I worked around the top of the spacer driving the screwdriver into the rubber with a few hammer strikes. When the screwdriver bottomed out, I’d step on the spacer and wrestle the screwdriver back out. If I were to do this again, I might go straight to the barbeque but I imagine the stink of burning rubber would have been that much worse, and I was short on charcoal.

Grab the pliers and pull at the bushing from time to time to try to remove it from the spacer:

NOTE: your spacer won’t look like this until AFTER the barbecue.

When I had the majority of the bushing pulled off of all 4 spacers, it was time for the barbeque! I put the spacers on the bottom grill of the charcoal grill and covered them with enough charcoal for a nice hot fire. I lit the fire and left them alone for 2 hours.

While waiting on the spacers, I grabbed the end links and brushed the insides of the bushing sleeves with the wire brush to clean them off.

I grabbed the new bushings and headed for the arbor press. Thinking back, it MIGHT have been easier to push these in once the spacers were ready to go back in, but I’ll never know.

I tried lubing the bushing and the end link, but that just encouraged the new bushing to slip around under the pressure. In the end, I put the dry bushing atop the end link and tried to keep it centered as the press came down slowly. Several times, the bushing would slip and end up diagonally in the hole. I just backed up and reset everything and tried again. Eventually (4-5 tries), the bushing would start to slip in leaving just one part of the flange sticking out but still looking mostly straight. I “pressed ahead” (har har) and the last of the flange slipped into the end link. Once I had it about halfway in, I moved the supporting press plate to just catch the edge of the end link so the new bushing could come out the bottom. Hang onto the end link as you finish the press, or you’ll be picking it up off of the ground.

I repeated this 4 times, and then went to check on the barbeque.

The coals were still hot, but after 2 hours I grabbed the spacers with my pliers and laid them on the concrete to cool for an hour. I’m 2/3 done at this point.

Once they cooled off, I went over each spacer with the wire brush to clean off the burned rubber and ash. They cleaned up really easily. I used a machine screw that was about the same diameter as the inside of the spacer to brush out the debris in there.

Your spacers should now look like mine (see the “AFTER barbeque” pic above).

The end links need one spacer pushed in from the outside and the other spacer pushed in from the inside. Don’t push them both in from the same side!

I put the end link with bushing on the press plate and put the spacer on top of that and pressed them most of the way home. This was a piece of cake, and left the spacer looking like this:

NOTE: I have flipped the assembly over to show you how there is still some pressing left to get the spacer all the way in.

I put a large socket on top of the bushing (large washers would have worked instead of the socket, but I didn’t have any with a diameter larger than the spacer):

I pushed them until they looked like this:

I put the end links back on the sway bar per the pictures I should have taken. I left the nuts on the end links pretty loose until I had everything back in place under the car.

I started the bolts on the cushions and on the end links and got them finger tight, then torqued them down as follows:

End link bolts 45 ft-lb

Cushion bolts 40 ft-lb

Finally, I tightened the end link nuts (holding the end links to the sway bar) to 45 ft-lb and declared victory!