Polyurethane bushes good or bad

Lambert wrote:

I was our at the weekend with the boys and one of the rs fords was saying he was fully polyurethane bushes and honestly notwithstanding his rather silly ride height he was jiggling about something rotten on what I considered to be decent tarmac, it was bad enough to be seen from outside. Increasingly I'm just not feeling it or rather I'd prefer not to have my teeth vibrating out of my head.

Knowing what people used to do to things like a Ford RS and the fact your said it was riding low. My money would be on the suspension being the culprit, not the bushes. In fact, too low and it was probably riding on the bump stops.

Back in the day (think Max Power era), you used to see loads of badly modded fwd hatches like that, literally wheels bouncing off the ground going slowly round a large round about.

Stiffer bushes may transmit more NVH, but shouldn't really impact overall ride, but they should take out the slope of the bush moving when you for instance change direction. Or on more powerful vehicles, to stop the engine rocking side to side/back and forth.

For example, Super Pro sell some uprated engine mounts for the Freelander 2 diesel, because when you tune them up and massively increase the torque, the engine rocks back and forth an alarming amount when you accelerate on standard bushes.

With something like the Jimny, the axles are only indirectly attached to the chassis, going via a number of isolating bushes. If you want to sharpen it all up, then a stiffer bush (poly or rubber) will be the way to go.

BTW and for the record, while I might have lived through the Max Power era and had many mates into slammed Nova's, Escort RS and the like, it was totally not me. I had a Land Rover, MGB GT. Then a Triumph TR7 which I converted to a V8 and alongside it bought a V12 Jaguar XJS. But I've done my share of modding over the years too.

However he had done it be that quick and dirty or expensive and posh, what he had done is removed virtually all the compliance from the suspension and chassis in the pursuit of what passes for sportiness in new cars. To my mind you need compliance and weight transfer, it's OK for a car to move around under dynamic load, so long as it's controlled and predictable.