I bought these drop links when I bought all the Whiteline parts for the rear anti roll bar upgrade. All info on that here. These are the same Whiteline KLC32 drop links as I used on the rear as they are also the correct part to replace the front drop links on the Forester. They weren’t entirely necessary as the original drop links were fine with no play in them but for some reason I decided to get them anyway and it would be interesting to fit them and see if the stiffer poly mounting of the drop link made any difference to the operation of the anti roll bar.
On to fitting them then.
Standard drop link coming off. These are often quite hard to remove due to corrosion and the Allen hex socket in the end of the shaft just rounds off. To try and prevent this I usually clean off the nuts and threads with a wire brush and spray some penetrating oil over them, ideally the day before or at least a little while before. I also clean out the Allen hex socket properly so the tool can fit in as far as possible and make double sure I am using the correct size tool. Sometimes if the hex socket is dirty and rusty a smaller tool can feel like it’s the right one but will just round the hex off. If all this fails which sometime happens I just have to carefully cut through the nut or backside of the bolt on the joint side.
Fortunately, being a quite recently imported car, these drop links came undone easily.
Other side.
Time to get the new ones on then.
Pretty obvious what to do here, just put them in place and put the nuts and bolts through with the various washers provided. So here are some pictures of them fitted.
These are in a location which gets a hard time on a car with weathering, road dirt and stone chips etc. So to help prevent the inevitable corrosion I gave them a coating of MIL-SPEC rust proofing wax. More info on the wax here.
Nice simple little job and surpisingly they made a noticable difference. I assume the stiffer, compared to the OEM ball joint, polyurethane bushes tend to resist a certain amount of the movement of the anti roll bar so have the effect of stiffening the bar slightly. As they soften up with use though I guess this effect will reduce. Surprised that I could feel any change at all to be honest though and they should last longer than the standard ball joint type drop link so worth fitting.
