Damn, I should have known better than to buy homemade parts from a guy whose RX7 has been on the jackstands for the last 6 years

LOL....too funny

Unless you use Nylatron GSM which is impregnated with molybdenum disulphide (and 10x the price)

might be worth the extra $$$ actually

Can you even find the stuff?

should we be trying to put a groove in the bushings to make sure some grease hangs around?

Lubrication was mandatory from day one. I was advised to use anti-seize for initial installation by the manufacturer instead of grease, and that later changed.

It was only after people started reporting squeaking that I started recommending Zerk fittings for re-lubing the bushings without having to disassemble the suspension.

It was several years after the first set of bushings was sold that Paul, who freely admitted that he did not relubricate his bushings, had one sieze on the track. At that time, the update to the directions which recommended the installation of Zerk fittings had been available online for well over two years. In fact, that document was created on October 29th, 2001.

http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlab/docs/Addendum.doc

What do you think happens if you remove all the lubrication and get some grit in the joint, then take the car on a track day? I don't know for sure that they melted, but the evidence seems to support that.

No, I'm telling you I don't know what is causing the noise on your car.

Because the rubber twists with the movement of the suspension. That's why tightening down the suspension bolts with the car still up in the air will make your car look like you installed a lift kit.

I'm sure you are. Nylon bushings will not mask noise from the suspension like the stock rubber bushings. However, you have yet to prove that the clunking noise is definitively being caused by the bushings.

Regrettable, and I'm sorry that you're not happy...

... but acting like a complete ass doesn't help the situation, does it?

Haha, I *knew* that was coming sooner or later. "jimlab" never lays down and always checks you with a gut punch! :D

i have a full set from a previous gb and another set from teh recent gb (still being completed), i installed some in the rear of the track car, lubed them up good, and installed zerks, ...i'll lube them up every time I get the car on the lift and ready for a track event, i report back if i ever take the control arms off again to check the bushings.

I've had very good luck with antisieze paste on s-bar bushings. I would think a high moly grease, or antiseeze paste, moly of other, would do best. lubricating solids, vs usual soap grease filler, should lube the best with low angle oscillating motion. the high moly grease would be best for very tight clearances. best to unload bushing by jacking, as much is practial, while regreasing.

That's an interesting grease, but couldn't find a catridge form of that grease on www.mcmaster.com This would make it difficult to put thru the zerk fittings ;)

how about that polyurea stuff??

poman, how often did you re-grease your bushings?

I think you know full well that despite your experience, the bushings are extremely high quality and work as advertised. It's simply the noise that you don't care to live with. From day one I said that they would be noisier than the stock bushings, and that they would not mask suspension noises like the stock bushings. Which part of that has anything to do with my car being on jackstands?

When properly maintained, they hold up just fine. There are well over a hundred sets on cars now, over 250 sets in circulation, and some have been on cars for several years. You don't see those people making childish comments about my RX-7 in relation to the quality of the bushings or their experience with them.

Wait a minute, I thought it was the fact that my car was on jack stands that was the problem...

Yeah, whatever. You've sacrificed any sympathy you might have gotten for a cheap shot that had no effect. Do you feel better now?

Maybe you should have thought of that before you started acting like one.

They have about 3000 miles or less. Don't drive in the rain. Greased them at 1500 miles and about 150 miles ago.

you are being an ass

and i didn't sell you bushings, or advise you how to maintain your car


however, from a 3rd party's point of view, i will say one thing...Jim can be a prick, but it's just his personality, he's usually dead on as far as knowledge, which I think we should all learn to benefit from

he's been through just about every upgrade path one could possibly take, and he is more than willing to share his $.02 with anyone on any subject.

you had bad bushings, or wanted more performance, eitherway, all three options presented to you, (OEM Mazda, MazdaSpeed, or JimLab) have different benefits, you went with Jim's bushings most likely because you are cheap, and the associated maintenance with Jim's are that they require lubrication regularly.

You also were fully aware that he did not have his own R&D and basically gave most of his installation and maintenance instructions based on theory and experience alone

I really don't buy that you are a victim of some sort of fraud here, you knew what you were getting into, and now it's your word against his, and in this case, since you are acting like an ass, he has the upper hand...oh and 250+ people run his bushings and this is one of a handful of threads with anything negative about the bushings.

Nothing beats Mazda OEM for the perfect balance between performance and comfort/reliability, this theme is carried out with just about any part on the car.

Actually, I did do R&D on the bushings, and the installation instructions were based on the three local cars that we installed them on a few months prior to their being available for sale. Those cars are still running the original bushings, by the way.

jim, next time the wife gets on you about something tell her she married you not for your looks but for your personality :p: :rlaugh:

The nylon bushings jim makes are going to function just fine BUT they were not intended to function under the same conditions as the stockers; they are going to require attention and lubrication in order to function correctly. IMO my daily driven car is not a good candidate for them because I'm unwilling to do this and so I have replaced my suspension with all stock parts though I am using jim's bushings in the trailing arms only.

The aftermarket toe link kits have the exact same problem. If you can keep them clean and keep them lubed they will last a long time, but that requires constant attention I don't wish to give. I just want the suspension to bolt to the car and function as intended without constant maintenance from me :)

Are you guys even reading what I posted. I LUBRICATED THEM TWICE W/IN 3000 MILES.

Can you get a "bad batch" of these bushings?

Perhaps poor QC on the machining? That is not quite in spec?

Pomanferrari, sounds like you did everything right. Can you pull off one of the bushings and take a look?

Have you isolated where exactly the noise is coming from?

No offense but something was improper then. The pics clearly show the center pins have worn oblong holes in the bushing material and something like that just isn't going to happen in 3000 miles unless the lube somehow softened the bushing or the bushing was terribly contaminated with grit.

I installed the trailing arm bushings with a film of marine grease and have many more than 3000 miles on them in all types of weather along with many track events and mine are perfectly fine; not even noisy.

The pics to me don't illustrate wear but some sort of contamination.

I think what this thread illustrates is the knack for people to latch on to an aftermarket part after having convinced themselves it's the perfect solution to their problem. Aftermarket parts tend to be designed for specialized conditions and if you're not willing to operate within those you're going to have problems.

The jimlab bushings are by their nature maintenance intensive compared to stock. Most buyers IMO of the jimlab bushings buy them either because of the performance advantage or because of the economics compared to buying stock parts. Regardless of the reason you buy you pick your poison and you live with it. People are always too quick to latch onto the perceived advantages of any part without truthfully evaluating the possible disadvantages and weighing them overall.

I have a 93 that has hardly any of the so called "reliability mods" ( I have silicone hoses, an AST and a downpipe) and I average over 15,000 daily driver miles a year along with racing the hell out of it nearly every other weekend. My car stays reliable because I maintain it to be that way. I constantly replace parts before they cause problems instead of waiting for them to fail and possibly damaging other systems. Bolting on "upgrades" does not maintain a car and in many cases the "upgrade" is in fact more maintenance intensive. You still have to be attentive to the car's maintenance needs and in many cases aftermarket parts actually increase the attention needed.

No, I take measurements on randomly selected pieces to check that they're in spec, and the center pins are all fitted to bushings prior to being sent out. The only thing I don't have control over are production variances on the OEM suspension components, but we tried to account for that by using test subjects for the original bushings from all three years in various configurations (R1, touring, etc.).

have you investigated the original theory of the strut bushing being bad and causing excess/improper strain/wear

I would think if the specs were so far off as to cause that kind of wear you'd notice before putting them on the car: Lots of slop. If you didn't notice then you'd certainly notice after installing them: Lots of noise from them immediately.

or when you regrease them every 3000miles suppsedly, how do you not notice that much freeplay?

Wow. What a trainwreck of a thread.

Now people are running off and making the wrong conclusions.

THOSE PICTURES POSTED ARE NOT OF MY BUSHINGS!!! THEY ARE DDR10 IN RESPONSE TO MY POST.

I have no idea what my bushings look like yet except that they make a huge racket after 15-20 miles of driving.

When cold, they're fine. I can't tell as yet if the car alignment geometry has changed when the car is hot.

And to those people who infer that I don't do maintainence, you are so far from the truth. At one point in my life, I was a foreign car mechanic. I was a ME. I maintain my car as a sort of Zen and the Mechanic of Rotary Performance. I treat my car like an airplane with operating hours b/w replacement of parts. I have a wrecked 93 RX7 stripped into a parts car in the basement since 1996. So being a gearhead gives me some credibility with these discussions. I'm not the moron that stuck a shirt into an intake.

The point of this discussion is to bring everyone with experience on the bushings out of the wood work. Having Jim dismiss these contentions as the rant of an ass detracts from the whole discussion.

Jim at one point may have had some relevancy in the discussion of an RX7 but since he started his mastubatory web blog on "How I Learned to Put a Cigarette Boat Motor into a Jap Car" I stopped going over to his postings to stroke his ego.

And despite what Jim thinks, these discussions on bad points or good points of his products are useful. For example, whatever happened to the "buttplugs"? If we didn't have the flame and arguments, it would have been a disservice to everyone who would've been suckered into buying them.