What have you done to your Tacoma today? 1st Gen Edition

Now that the ambient temperatures have dropped to single digits and the teens, my trucks engine temps have risen 5-10° F higher than normal. I'm a little confused why it does this...

 

Lame. Not as excited now

 

I've been thinking about it for 5 years. LOL

But budget and where I was at in the build didn't catch up with what I was thinking, till now.

 

Where are we getting the information that SPC bushings are discontinued, and you have to replace the arms instead of just the bushings?

The Part number for 1st Gen UCAs is 25460 Listed here: https://www.spcalignment.com/compon...Tacoma&year=2002 - 2002&from=USAFrom&to=USATo

The link to the replacement "Spec Ride" bushings is here: https://www.spcalignment.com/index.php?option=com_spc&task=part_description&pid=25466

And from All Pro here: Are we talking about the "xAxis" bushings being discontinued? They are kind of dumb. But SPC is saying the replacement bushing for (all) 25460 UCAs is the "Spec Ride" bushing anyway. (there have been 3 or 4 different versions of the 25460)


Am I missing something? It would be completely stupid for SPC to make a (now) $850 part have to be replaced because the poly bushings wore out and they aren't serviceable. (Jesus those things have gone up in price, haven't they?)

 

no the poly spec ride bushings. SPC is no longer making them. All that is left is what is in stock in warehouses or resellers. That's it. All have been superseded by the xAsis stuff.

@turbodb discovered this a few months back the hard way.



And yeah, they are pricey, why I don't think it's worth anyone that has a uniball setup to switchover.

 

Wow... that's fucking stupid. I just called SPC and they still have sets in stock. But what a bullshit move, to sell a product that was serviceable and then pull the rug out like that.

 

I noticed you called SPC in a later post, but since Monte mentioned it, here's what I ran into https://adventuretaco.com/replacing-my-spc-upper-control-arms-with-spc-ucas/#Update20221017, or, you can scroll to the top of that to read the entire replacement...where they told me that the x-axis were a lifetime, no-maintenance joint.

If I were doing it again, I'd buy 3-4 sets of the specride bushings right now, and just let them sit on the shelf. As it is, I think they will warranty my arms every year or so when the X-axis wear out. Of course, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, and the x-axis will last forever...

 

They won't.

 

Ya, that sucks. Why didn't you just order a new set of bushings instead of replacing with the xAxis type? I guess we can ask ourselves those types of questions all day, in hind sight.

The guy at SPC just told me he has at least 18 sets of the bushings in stock.

For them to have even mentioned "Lifetime" and then said service life is 36K miles is laughable... as you said, 36K is about a year for me. The bushings in my SPCs are SpecRide. I just pulled them last night, to start the LT install. The bushings still appear to be good after 5 years of rough driving. Maybe they should rethink their strategy and go pack to the SpecRide... they appear to be much more of a "lifetime" part than the xAxis lol.

 

@Wadar I have been running into the same exact issue with my cv boot clamp hitting my ADS coilovers. I used to have screw style clamps, so I went to OEM clamps. Still happened. Now I got some misalignments from @TMFF and going to try to NOT run the boot slide mod anymore, and see if it helps any. Basically try to increase space between coilover and boot wherever I can.

 

A little more digging and there's this.

You can upgrade your SpecRide arms to xAxis bushings... More like a down grade if you ask me, BUT this tells me the Spec Ride arms could, still, in theory be serviced even AFTER the SpecRide bushings are gone.

The cost of the xAxis replacement bushings are quite a bit more than the replacement SpecRide bushings. But at least you wont have $800 paper weights if your SpecRide bushings go bad.

https://www.spcalignment.com/index.php?option=com_spc&task=part_description&pid=25021



Kind of bullshit that everywhere on their site says you can buy the Spec Ride bushings with no mention of them being discontinued in any way. I told that to the guy I talked to on the phone BTW.

 

I sort of covered the "why not specride" at the top of the post, but the TL;DR is that I needed new bushings and was just curious how much the x-axis would be. They were 5x more, but I was told they were lifetime (even after questioning what that meant several times) so I was like... sounds good to me, if I never have to service them!

So, I was bamboozled, really.

The fact that the specride can be replaced with the x-axis sort of has me thinking though... they told me that I *can't* replace the x-axis with specride, but are they bamboozling me there too? Maybe I can. It would be a little wonky to have two different x-axis outer sleeves (or whatever) for 25460 arms.

Might be worth the $56 to find out (or whatever the specrides cost).

 

Machine press in sleeves and I don't see why you couldn't run another poly bushing in an x-axis arm

 

Bingo! That's what I was thinking as well.

 

Not sure I totally follow. Also have a couple questions.

Follow - are you saying that I'd put a different sleeve in the x-axis arms? I was thinking that I'd just press out the sleeve that contains the x-axis, and hope that the arm sleeve is the same on all versions of the 25460. (A couple images below)

Question - are there places where you can get "custom" poly bushings to fit any sleeve diameter? You surely know more about this than I do. Maybe the answer is to just buy "some" and then have them turned on a lathe?

PMed (as you know)

 

I never had the old SpecRide arms so I'm not sure what width the bushing holding portion was or the diameter of hole through it. You can order poly bushings of just about any size and diameter (including inner diameters). But you could get lucky and be plug n play with the old bushings in the new cast arms. These arms are just stopgap items for me and I got them cheap so I don't have a horse in the race of finding out. I'd just make sleeves to fit other poly bushings if the old style specride ones don't fit. Wouldn't take long to turn your own sleeves.

 

This had me double checking mine... I have the old tubular style SPC arms but they came with xAxis bushings. I purchased them about two years ago so maybe that was around the time they were switching to the newer forged arms.

 

Put on some new to me 3rd Gen 4runner wheels and some hankook tires. Definitely not as good as my wildpeak at3w in this snow but i wanted to get a set of highway tires.

 

I have one I have been adding parts to for a long time

 

well i havnt put them in yet but my new hopefully better led headlights came today...also my hopefully dimmer red map light arrived too.. its about 15 below right now so not sure ill get them in tonight but when i do, ill give a full report. Im not expecting much as the headlights are just Amazon specials...but had really good reviews.