I ordered new chassis bushings for the Land Rover from Rovers North this week, and they arrived yesterday. I ordered the original style because everything I've read says that replacement poly bushings are junk. That said, I was not looking forward to installing these. Getting the old bushings out of the frame were a pain and I tried making a tool that would pull them but ended up using a hacksaw to split the outer steel sleeve so that I could remove them. As I was dreading this, I decided that I would need a new approach to installing these. Since I had stripped multiple piece of threaded rod trying to remove the old ones, I decided that I was gong to need a stronger thread.
Enter the scissor jack - I had an old scissor jack floating around that sacrificed it's square threaded rod for the purposes of a dedicated Land Rover busing installer/extractor. I ground the rivets down and popped the threaded rod and nuts out of the jack. It was the perfect diameter to fit through the new bushings.
I wire brushed the hole good, and then lubed everything up with wheel bearing grease and then used the air impact gun to pull the bushing into place. I've heard of this process taking an hour per bushing but my set-up and new tool worked like a charm and I installed one bushing in less than 30 seconds...
...only to find out that the front chassis bushings are different from all the rest. They are slightly longer that the rest of the bushings that go in the rear of the frame and all of the leaf springs. Oh well, I'll order the correct ones for the front of the chassis and install the others in the leaf springs and the rear of the chassis. I'm just glad my fancy new tool works.
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