Rear sway bar bushings

[Anubys]

Hey all,

I haven't really done a lot of maintenance on the Imola sedan myself, as I haven't owned a garage until recently. I usually take her to an indy shop that I have been dealing with for many years (great people btw) but now that I have my own house with a garage to store tools and such I was hoping to start wrenching on her myself.

With that being said my first official maintenance project is the rear sway bar bushings. I'm getting a creaking noise from the back end when and I've been told that its the rear sway bar bushings, so I went to UUC and purchased a set, since I have the UUC sway bars. They just arrived today and I was hoping to get some advice from you fine gentlemen about what to watch out for when doing this, it seems fairly straight forward so I hope everything goes smoothly.

This is what they sent me, what am should I be using the loctite? I assume the bushing carrier bolts?

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20170916/17f0b2ae1378ca719a103061e52998c1.jpg

[Bludsport]

The creaking noise could be caused by several things, i.e. trailing arm bushings and/or upper and lower control arm ball joints, differential carrier bushings, etc. When do you notice the creaking noise the most? I had the same issue and would mostly hear the creaking sounds when I was parking and transitioning between forward and reverse. How many miles are on your car? My car just turned 70K miles and I just completed a full front and rear suspension refresh. The only bushings I didn't replace were the ones for the diff carrier. It wasn't a terrible job and timewise, it took me about 12 to 15 hours to complete. All the moaning and groaning, squeeking and creaking noises are completely gone now and the car handles better than new thanks to a few upgrades I installed. If you're going to go to the trouble of installing the sway bar bushings anyway, I'd seriously think about at least changing out the sway bar end links as well. Hell, once you're down there, I'd do as much as you can cuz you're not wanna crawl under there again any time soon.

The Loctite is a lubricant to smear on the bushings, not the threads.

[Anubys]

Thanks for the response! Would I need different end links if I have aftermarket away bars? Or can I just use stock ones?

[Sockethead]

If you have UUC sway bars, you most likely have UUC end links as the OEM end links don't work on their bars. The UUC end links don't have any rubber parts on them.
The poly bushings that come with the UUC sway bars need to be lubed to keep them from making noise. Use the loctite lube between the bar and the bushings. No need to use thread locking compound on the nuts, they are self locking.

[Anubys]

So I replaced the rear sway bar bushings today. The one near the exhaust side was a real PITA lol unfortunately the creak I was having is still there :mad So now I'm not sure what's going on back there.

Here is a video I found on YouTube that sounds identical:


https://youtu.be/H5C21Q4ZAYg

I'm thinking maybe rtab but the comment section says the guy found a broken weld somewhere so I'm not sure. I'll continue to investigate and post anything I find.