hi my trailing arm bushes are shot. to remove the bushes do i bash them out from underneath the the car or from the outside in. i was quoted £160 to do them at a garage but i have bought the bushes already as i like a challenge any help please

I know to do them in poly you need to burn them out.

The old bush presses out from the inside to outside.
The new bush presses in from the outside to inside.

Or so the later Rover books say.

Certainly didn't work out like that when I did mine. Ended up hot and very sweaty, and with a couple of broken hacksaw blades! There is a garage tool, the best part of £200, to press them out, but for me with a combination of hammers, wood blocks and G-clamps, they just wouldn't budge on the car, had to take the trailing arms off and do them on the bench, one per weekend.

Then the next time I jacked the car, I noticed they had already started tearing away from their cross beams, as the unloaded trailing arm droops with quite a camber. MOT hasn't complained as yet though.

HTH

[Edit - some further thoughts:]
The ones I put in were genuine NOS Unipart, which ought to be top grade, I reckoned.

Before I started the job, I wondered how the new ones should be aligned in the trailing arm.
Transversely, I made measurements of the new bushes, the arm and the fixing pints in the chassis, with the car at normal ride height. I came to the conclusion that the outer ring of the bush should end up flush with the rounded 'bulb' edging of the trailing arm. This isn't mentioned in the books.

Ideally, the flats on the bush centre pin should rest on the chassis abutments without torsional strain. Again, with the car at normal ride height on a level surface, I made a crude 'internal micrometer' by clamping a couple of overlapping strips of wood together to get a measure of the distance between the ground and the chassis seating face. Then I looked for a reference point on the trailing arms which matched this height. There's a circular hole forward of the hub, about 25mm diameter. This was spot-on plus/minus 1mm the same as my measured height. So I set my bushes up with the upper surface of the cross pin aligned with the centre of this hole. Which is another thing the book says nothing about.

'Course, it goes a bit out of kilter when a load is introduced, but at least I gave it a fighting chance!

thanks guys, i tried doing them insitu , but they wouldn't come out. i ended up taking the whole trailing arms off and knocking them out on a work bench even then fitting them in took some effort . all done now, not a job i want to do again. it was a complete pig off a job.

Hi,

I did an illustrated article on this for The Viking a while back. I've got it as a Word document with photos of how to do it. I replaced the bushes with polyurethane parts as some of the rubber aftermarket ones don't last long. So far so good. BTW, I did this with the trailing arms on the car.

Just PM me if you would like a copy of the article. It was in Viking but I'm not sure how we access back numbers from the website.

Cheers,
Hugh

my local garage did 1 for 60 quid last year I did the drivers side by removing the arm no need to remove the arm at all he said