I always thought that my wife's 200sx had a rough ride in the front. I always thought it was a poor shock design. But nooooo. Listen to this. I took the right side A arms off last night and discovered something that makes me think softer shocks won't help. There are rubber bushings in the A arm pivots that have a wall thickness of about 3/16". Inside these rubber bushings is a steel bushing for the bolt to go thru. The rubber bushing is glued to the ID of the arm pivot and the steel bushing is glued to the ID of the rubber bushing. So the whole thing is solid in the arm pivot. The steel bushing is longer than the pivot eye and has teeth on it so when you tighten the bolt up, the teeth bite into the frame mount and hold the A arm in place. When the A arm moves up & down, it is rotating on that rubber. So, you can push the arm up or down and it springs back into place. Normally the A arm rotates on bearings that are free. This is very stiff, even without a shock mounted. I'm going to loosten the bolts way up and see if it helps (let the shock do the work, not the rubber bushings). If it does, I'll somehow come up with bearings for the A arms. What do you guys think? I never heard of such a thing. And why?

 

Hey Bud. In response to your PM, my 250 doesn't have arms like that. Mine are more of a trailing arm than upper and lower A arms. It's only got one arm per wheel and has a pivot point in front of the front wheel. Now, on to your issue. Since I'm relatively new to quads, but not to suspensions, that bushing setup doesn't make sense. So, the rubber of the bushing has to twist for the arm to move? I can see why that doesn't work well. As a fix, here's what I'd do. I'd torch out the old bushing and throw in some poly bushings of the same measurements. There are several companies that I've found online that have a ton of sizes in stock for a million uses. Some like Poly Performance may even custom make bushings with sleeves to suit your control arms. If you want me to look around in the areas that I know of, shoot me another PM with the exact measurements of the bushings and sleeve ID and I'll see what I can find.

 

A poly bushing sounds like a good idea. But I also need to find a softer shock. Here's what I did: I loostened all the pivot bolts up until the arms flopped up & down freely. Then I mounted the shock and tried it. The darn thing is STILL stiff. So, even if I replace the rubber with a poly bushing, I will still need to find a decent shock. A TRX90 is 1" too short but maybe I can make a mount to fix that.