Re: steering rack mounts? (archive)

Over the 20 years that our car has been around, oil and grime wear these down nicely, leading to shimmy and unresponsive, sloppy steering. Best thing you can do is order the urethane mounts from bmpd in the states. ...

Yep, that's what I just did. Had a bunch of oil and grime built up around mine. When I took the plunge and removed my bushings, they looked bad from the outside, but the inside remained as new as the day it rolled out of the factory. It appears that on mine, the casing was tight enough to prevent any oil from attacking the bushing itself. Seeing that I already had the urethanes from BMP on my doorstep, I installed them.

I haven't installed any yet, but it's supposed to be pretty straightforward.
From my recent experience, it appeared to be straightforward, ie there were only four bolts holding it all together, but is was NOT that straightforward upon reassembly. Here's my take on it.

(1)The urethane are much more difficult to compress, and they don't allow the two casing halfs from closing "easily" and within the bushing's collars. I had to pull out three C-clamps, and a bolt&nut to get it fully compressed.

There are two different sized spacer sleeves, and it is not all that obvious which went to which. Furthermore, the larger diameter spacing sleeve has to be forced against the flat of the urethane bushings in order to line up through the mounting holes of the rack and subframe...again, urethane don't compress all that easily. Hence a wide bod c-clamp aids considerably in compressing the bushings for aligning the bushings through the mounting holes.

Furthermore, if I hadn't had a second 323 available to compare, I would have never known the correct configuration to remount the rack. Even w/ the 323 factory manual available, the book didn't explicitly show the orientation of the rack as assembled onto the frame. So my suggestion is to be very cognizant of the assembly prior to installing. THe correct orientation is for the two casing halfs to be sandwiched in between the upper and lower brackets of the engine subframe. Since the urethane bushings make the two casing halfs very difficult for full compression, the result is that it will not sandwich in between the two bracket frames. Thus, it is easy to assume that the top casing half should lay above the upper brackets of the engine mount and the lower casing lay above the lower bracket. In this assumed assemby, the rack fits easily into the two brackets. But I now know that this is incorrect.

In my case, I would have been satisfied in the time I burned to replace bushings that needed replacement. I now have two nearly brand new rubber rack mount bushings sitting in my parts bin. Oh well, win some, you lose some...

Some B4 / after pics of the rack mount bushings

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