Bent front control arms

Have any of you bent the front control arms, and what did you do about it?

At least three of us in our club have bent a front control arm.

Unfortunately, unless they are bent in a controlled environment, the bend will have weakened them. I would therefore be inclined to replace with an un-bent arm - just for safety sake.

I imagine they have bent because of pushing the articulation too far. One simple mod which will relieve much of the stress is to use what are known as 'slotted bushes'.

Where the arms join on to the axle, they are held on by two bolts through rubber bushes. If you remove some of the rubber above and below the bolt on one bush on each side (if you slot both bushes it makes the handling terrible), it will allow quite a lot of extra articulation before the arms bend.

For Land Rovers, companies such as SuperPro sell pre-slotted bushes (and may well for Suzuki as well?) but it's just as easy to drill the rubber out yourself.

Si

X-Eng Simon wrote: I imagine they have bent because of pushing the articulation too far. One simple mod which will relieve much of the stress is to use what are known as 'slotted bushes'.

Thanks Si,

However, I run at stock height with the anti-roll bar disconnected. The other two guys are running 40-50mm lift with anti-roll bar in place.

Vic

The original bushes on my front were solid! It may be that some aftermarket parts are not like the others.

Rear were slotted - but there was still potential for slotting them some more!

Stronger arms may cure the symptom, but not the cause. Whereas increasing the movement in the bushes reduces the stress in everything.

Although it requires a bit more fabrication, keeping the original arms and making an X-Link or Cross link setup would achieve much better articulation and be fairly easy to construct on a Jimny.

Si