Rear spring plate bush replacement

[metric_thumbs]

Hello
Could somone suggest a good place to purchase the bushes on a rear 944 turbo spring plate?
Pelican Parts have them but a UK supplier would be nice

Thanks in advance

 

[Neil Haughey]

I think you must mean Weltmeister delrin bushes. I have them in my car a complete pig to fit (but luckily I didn't have to do it). The better alternative is the Elephant racing phosphor bronze bushings but they are vastly more expensive and even more work to fit. I have never seen either for sale in the UK. I don't know if anyone else makes a comparable product.

Note that you can't buy replacement OEM bushings, you have to buy the spring plate as a complete item which is very expensive (ISTR Porsche call it Spring strut on the parts listing).

I have ordered a couple of times from both Paragon products and Pelican, the only problem was that the first time with Pelican I had to wire them the money (wish I hadn't it was both a hassle and an expense). Both provided me with products delivered to my door as quickly as if they had come from a UK supplier.

 

[Super_Marv]

Yep, I looked into this before buying the ER bearings. Like Neil says, the only real viable options are to replace with new OEM springplates, Delrin or Elephant Racing Polybronze Bearings, with the last two only being available from America.

I had no problems whatsoever dealing with Elephant Racing. I gather the only real difficult part is drilling the holes for the grease nipples.

Neil - how do you find your Delrin's? Some people moan that they squeak, others say they're fine...

 

[Neil Haughey]

Hi Marv, yes they squeak a fair bit sometimes. Rather annoyingly its more then just noise as I am convinced they bind up a little as the ride quality is better when there isn't any noise. It seems to be worse in warm weather, but it always seemed to be pretty random to me.

On the positive side the back end of the car feels amazingly tight in a way that is very un 44/68 like, on the track the slight rear steering effect never materialised for me so I could get away with running a much stiffer back end (before fitment the back end would sling around at quick road speeds). My old setup for example used CS type lowering springs on the front and 27mm torsion bars on the rear, this gives wheel rates around 170 ish lb/inch on the front and 225 lb/inch on the back.

The absolute ideal solution IMHO would be replacement spring plates but with much harder rubber, perhaps like turbo cup parts or something.

 

[Super_Marv]

On the positive side the back end of the car feels amazingly tight in a way that is very un 44/68 like,

Excellent, cheers Neil - didn't realise they make that much difference. You've got me hoping the ER bearings will have a similar effect!

 

[metric_thumbs]

Thanks very much both
Appreciated

 

[Neil Haughey]

ORIGINAL: Super_Marv

On the positive side the back end of the car feels amazingly tight in a way that is very un 44/68 like,

Excellent, cheers Neil - didn't realise they make that much difference. You've got me hoping the ER bearings will have a similar effect!

Well this was on a car with 150K+ mile old bushes that had been driven hard for at least 50K miles. Mike at MR did the rear suspension for me at the time, he told me all the old bushes in particular the mounting ones more or less fell off the car. ISTR the problem with the bushes on the spring plate is they go ovalised over time. I wouldn't be surprised if new OEM spring plates felt miles better as well. Overall solid bushings do make for a very tight handling car, as an example I never ever felt any tramlining on my S2 (it had solid top mounts and delrin wishbone bushes as well) whereas my 968 on exactly the same tyres but less extreme geometry does. I am not 100% convinced though that they actually make the car significantly faster.