Our final track day for the year is coming up in under two weeks so I wanted to get the last annoyance sorted on Bumblestook. While she's generally "good to go", I developed a weird suspension knocking sound on the right rear after the last track day that I initially thought was the diff but turned out to be wear on the rear upper control arm. The solid bushing wore just enough that at low speed (say below 5mph and especially when reversing) I would hear a noise coming from under the car. This wasn't detrimental to the handling but it was annoying me and frankly sounded embarrassing when moving around a parking a lot.
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| New rear upper control arm with rubber pushed taken out - 9/15/19 |
Bumblestook is always sorted and I hate leaving things unsettled so I ordered a brand new OEM rear upper control arm and had SJF take out the OEM rubber bushings so we could press in a fresh set of solid ones from Ballade Sport (same as the one I had on my arm). Luckily, Brad had an extra set lying around that he wasn't going to use so I bought it off him and so today I went to
SJF Performance and he pressed the new bushing in and swapped it into the car.
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| New solid bushing getting pressed in - 9/15/2019 |
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| New upper rear arm installed - 9/15/2019 |
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| Mmm....fresh ball joint - 9/15/2019 |
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| Old upper control arm |
I took it out for a test drive and everything is now tight again and no more annoying noises. Also, we finally put loctite on that driver side rear damper bolt that keeps backing out on its own. The passenger side, that already had loctite, hadn't moved at all but this one worked its way loose again since the
last time I tightened it.
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| Loctite on driver rear damper bolt - 9/15/2019 |
Just as an extra precaution, we also put it on the alignment rack to double check the alignment and as expected it's all still good. We didn't expect it would move but I don't like question marks so taking the extra time to double check is worth it in my book.
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| Back on the alignment rack - 9/15/2019 |
I spent the rest of the day driving her around to make sure everything was feeling good and she's perfect again ready for some fun times with
S2K Takeover at NYST.
