Hi all,
I recently picked up a set of elephant racing polybronze bushings, direct from them. Almost immediately after unboxing them I found that they were extremely loose as for as bushings go. I broke out the calipers and took many measurements (ill attach a few images). All four bushings measured the near the same.

Measurements as follows
Bronze bushing ID 2.100"
Steel sleeve OD 2.092"

Total of .008" over, or .004" per side of clearance.

I do have a fare amount of experience with bushings and this much tolerance would be considered worn out. A proper fit, greased, at this diameter would be .002" over, maybe even less.
How this bushing is designed as is, all the actual load would have to be taken up by the beveled part of the bushing with some careful shimming of the spring plate cover. The beveled area is much smaller and doesn't get nearly as much grease as the barrel of the steel sleeve. I'm certain this would lead to accelerated wear/ considerable play, and the need to reshim the spring plate cover over time. All in all I'm not too impressed with the quality of the parts, given the price. I have reached out to Elephant Racing and they responded with its fine and the tolerance is for grease.

I'm interested to know if anyone else has noticed this, or has any info or experience on the long term wear or problems with these parts?

 

Hi @Tutter

For some reason, the text in your post is clear / transparent (to me anyway.) I had to highlight the text in order to read what you wrote Edit - Thanks for the correction.

In any case, I am curious to hear from others if they've experienced anything like this. While I don't have Elephant Racing's bearings, I do have some of their suspension pieces on my dual street/track Boxster. Interested to see if this level of engineering/quality is consistent across the board. Thanks.

 

Oh weird, looks like I just needed to set the text color option to automatic. Thanks for the heads up.

 

@Tutter I don't know if there is enough user traffic in this forum.

Perhaps if you cross post this in the vehicle-specific forum on Rennlist, you might get more bites. I know Elephant Racing products are more popular among the air-cooled crowd.