Rear control arms for '73 LeSabre

Had a breakthrough today, I'll explain:

After going over the front end again I was still not convinced (yes, it does need shocks). We decided to loosen the rear control arm bolts, settle the car on the suspension and retorque the bolts properly to see what happens. Was able to loosen all but one bolt, the lower/rear of the pass. side lower control arm. After some struggling with it, it snapped. Okay, fine, let's replace it. Well we couldn't find 9/16 bolts anywhere on a Sunday, but we brought back a 5/8 bolt just in case it would fit. I noticed that the hanging control arm was really sloppy/wobbly, just way too much. So we tried the 5/8 bolt. It wouldn't fit through the holes in the frame or rearend, but it was surprisingly able to fit in the control arm bushing. Whaaat?

So - in looking at replacement lower control arm bushings for my car they all say "Must reuse OEM inner sleeve". Huh? So - I think we figured out what happened. At some point the lower control arm bushings were replaced with ones from a '70, or ones that didn't need new inner sleeves. That left a 5/8 hole for a 9/16 bolt. Whoever put it together didn't notice (probably me, 20 years ago), and the rear has been sloppy ever since. A few years ago when I put it back on the road we swapped rearends with somebody. Again I didn't notice (kept my control arms), although I did notice the slight side to side drifting.

We couldn't find 9/16 bolts except a few specialty stores online, and now that I figured out we had bushings with a 5/8 sleeve, the answer was clear. Drilled open the frame and rear to accomodate the 5/8 bolts, tightened things up and went for a ride. It handles everything better now - no steering wheel shift with the gas pedal, no swaying around when we go over big bumps, it rides straight and true like it used to. Absolutely night and day difference.

Thanks all for the suggestions, I was definitely not expecting to find what we did, and I almost didn't check for it! Thanks everybody for the suggestions, but even with all of those we probably wouldn't have found this. Only discovered it because we broke one of the bolts!!! A lucky break!

Anyway, problem solved!
-Derek

 

That's good to read, Derek :TU:

And this is the first time I hear about those inner sleeves, so thank you for posting your story.

It's like the tip that one has to remove the resistor wire when you switch to a HEI ignition, if you don't know about that, it can drive you crazy.
Or that one of the fusible links in the wiring is gone when you only have head lights and no other power.

Sharing experiences like this is what I like about this board, sometimes the solution for a problem is so easy, but you have to know about it first :beer