Change the front bushings in your Dakars

Replaced my dakar bushings 2 yrs. ago with factory bushings no more squeaking and creaking

 

Hey @CrustyTaco, I'm glad you got your clunk fixed! Sounds like I may not be the only one who lived with this problem for a while. After a few thousand miles I'm still enjoying this upgrade. The ride improvement is very real for me. Like you, I used a ratchet strap and a bottle jack for aligning the main eyes. A little persuasion with a rubber mallet also helped. Its nice to finally have the rear dialed in. Now on to the original LCA bushings, but thats a job for when it warms up again.

 

Does anyone know whether the bushings specified in OP would work with the ARB EL111R leaf pack?

The EL111R + AAL is what came with the OME BP51 suspension kit, but isn't listed on the . Wondering whether the information is stale, or the leaf pack is incompatible.

 

Sorry, I can't help you. My experience is just with the old style Dakars for 1st gens. There is a new part number for 1st gen springs now but I don't know what changed. I would hope it was the supplied bushings. You should just call Wheelers with your part number and remove any doubt. Their customer service is pretty good. You might get lucky and find that your kit comes with poly bushings. Good luck.

 

Ghost Ship - i'm sure this is a dumb question, but I just replaced the front OEM bushing with the Wheeler's poly bushings for my Dakar CS047's. I ordered the Dobinson's greasable bolts, but started to think about it and it won't work...if the bolt goes into the steel sleeve inside of the poly bushings, then i'm only greasing between the bolt and sleeve. Did I miss something? Is there a perforated sleeve?

 

You didn’t miss anything. Those bolts don’t really work for our application but a lot of people insist on using them. At most, the grease would spread out to the face of the bushing but you wouldn’t really get much use there either if the leaf spring bolts are torqued properly. I suppose they could provide some rust/anti-sieze protection in the salt belt but even then it would be minor IMO compared to a true rust treatment.

 

You could take the sleeve out and drille some holes in them. Ive been looking into a solution for my dakars for awhile now and stumbled across this thread, glad I did. I think im going to have a bushing day for both eyelets on the leaf springs, greasable shackles and bolts, steering rack bushings, lower control arm bushings with greasable bolts, remove my spc upper control arms drill holes and install grease zerks in them so they can be greased. Ill have a ton of grease zerks when im done but damnit it wont squeak.

 

Got rid of my poly bushings and went to factory bushings on recommendation from long time local spring shop and put in Dorman leaf spring pads on my Dakars 2 years ago no creaking or squeaking or greasing since

 

Impressive to see the damage of 9 Canadian winters. Just rebuilt the Dakar leafs, removed the 3rd leaf and coated with POR-15. The front factory style bushings were seized in place and wouldn’t press out, they were still in good shape so left them in place. The sleeves of the rear poly bushings were disintegrating. For anyone doing this job, just order factory rear shackles from Toyota instead of cutting out the rubber bushings. Makes for a quick install of new poly bushings.