While I had the rest of the suspension apart I figured I may as well replace the 20 year old rubber anti roll bar bushes with something a little better. So as I was already ordering a list of parts from EliseParts.com I went for some of their Nylatron ARB bushes.

The bushes and grease supplied by EP and the original mounts removed from the car and given a light clean as they were very clean anyway.

Well I got stuck into fitting them, expecting them to just bolt in easily, and found they weren’t a particularly great fit.

After fitting one side I could see the mount on the other side was not going to land in the right place for the bolts to line up with the threads on the chassis as it was over to one side. The flanges on the bushes that fill the space between the mount and the collar on the roll bar were just too thick. If both sides were fitted loosely it would have been possible to tighten everything up into place but that would have just caused the bushes to bind up very tightly on the roll bar.

So with one side bolted in place and the other bracket placed as it should be I compared the remaining gap with the thickness of the flange on the bush.

Clearly there is some overlap there that shouldn’t be. As it happens it’s just a little more than the thickness of the the collar on the roll bar which made it easy enough to know how much thinner the bush needed to be.

At least 2.2mm.

So at least 1.1mm needed removing from each bush plus a little more to give some clearance. The bushes started out at 39.9mm wide.

So after some time spent on the bench grinder and some filing and sanding…

…I got the bush down to a better dimension with a nice flat finish.

Original and modified compared.

The new dimension. About 1.3mm removed.

So with both bushes trimmed down I did a quick test fit to be sure the mounts would now line up with the threads in the chassis which they did. So I could get on to applying grease and fitting the bushes for real.

I used most of the grease supplied with the bushes on the first attempt at fitting them which I had to remove. Fortunately I had loads of grease for the same purpose left after fitting various other bushes on other cars.

So that job took way longer than it should have done! But at least I didn’t miss any of the snooker while I was doing it. 🙂