I'll be getting ready to swap out my t bars soon and this weekend I was under the car trying to decide how I can best achieve this.

On this site, I've seen many posts about cutting holes in the quarter panels so you can slip the t bars out a bit and re index, however, to actually install new t bars you need to drop the entire rear suspension assy. I think one person even said you could actually loosen all the bolts and tilt one side down at a time to do the replacement.

My question is: How the heck can you reindex the t bars without dropping the whole assy because the plate that covers the t tube also goes up into the body and I can't see how that would slide out from the car. It looks to only drop down.

I even have an entire t tube / suspension assy sitting in my garage from a parts car and when I took it out, it came streight down. What am I missing Guys ?

Tom

 

i just put in new tbar's last week. didn't drop the suspension.

1) seperate the trailing arm from the spring plate, 2 securing bolt+nuts
2) disconnect rear sway bar by taking off the endlink 1 bolt+nut, 1 nut + eccentric camber adjustment bolt
3) take out the shock. 2 bolt+nut
4) undo the torsion bar cover 4 bolts, 1 extra long bolt+nut in front
5) undo 13mm bolt+nut on top of the banana arm thingie

the entire assembly on this side will drop with the help of a pry bar enough that u can get the spring plate+torsion bar out.

when you reassemble though, u'll want to disconnect the trailing arm from the torsion tube carrier so that u can put the spring plate back in the right spot. spring plate goes on the inside of the trailing arm "tab"

 

and yea...decide on whether or not you wanna spend baller money on elephant racing polybronze bushings

 

What did you do about the brake lines? I recall the hard line goes to the t tube assy and then t's off to flexible lines on each side. Was there enough wiggle room in the hard line or did you pop off the brackets for it in a few spots to make slack ?

Good info, thanks much !

Tom

 

oh yea u wanna pull the tabs off. or just disconnect it at the caliper completely. be sure to catch the drippings though.

 

Yup. Four basic options.

Baller Polybronze.
Better-than-OEM Delrin.
OK polyurethane.
OEM.

Considering that the spring plate bushing is a rotating, friction surface, it amazes me that the bushing (OEM) is rubber. The "cup" where the rubber rubs was all gummed up with rock hard rubber growths. I had to Dremel/wire brush the cup clean.

I went with Delrin. Less play than rubber and a better friction surface.

 

Don't forget to replace bush onto body from springplate cover at the same time.

 

i was reading about that one. i replaced it with the welt poly bushings but i was reading that u really don't need performance bushings on those.

 

I replaced all mine with poly bushes from pro flex I don't know if they make any difference or not as the car is still not finnished.I thought I might as well replace them as the originals were 20 years old,I may have a different point of view because I also removed all of the suspension and cleaned and painted back to facyory spec as i went along.