Rear wheel hop above 35mph

[Zed Head]

9 minutes ago, gnosez said:

I can't comment on what others did.

Exactly.  Or their experiences.  Some people have had broken rods, others haven't.  You are a single data point.

In my case, a major sign was that the groaning of the bushings went away when I replaced the back bushing with rubber.  The groaning was loud and came straight up through the floor when passing over bumps.  I think that if a person installed the T/C rod in its frame rail mount with PU front and back, but not connected to the control arm, then grabbed it and tried to pull it through it's expected range of motion they might find the effort extreme and be able to actually see the tip of the rod deflect and/or the back PU get crushed by the force.  Maybe one of the resto guys has the parts to do that.  The rod is a very long lever, and the edges of the PU actually act as levers on the tip of the rod.  Flex, flex, flex, break.

There's a metal sleeve with the kits, so you can't really overtighten on the PU itself.  The washers bottom out on the sleeve.  Doesn't mean that the sleeve is the optimum length though.

We shouldn't overlook that the PU that most companies use is all of the same high hardness, and the same "fill the space" design.  Not like the engineered design of the Nissan bushings.  Somebody just went through and replaced all rubber with PU, with no apparent design considerations except shape.  IT could also be that there are subtle differences nishape between the manufacturers.  My kit of bushings came from MSA, on sale, and the only manufacturer ID I found in it was from Ground Control, for the steering rack bushings installation.  So it was probably all a box of Ground Control bushings, I'd guess.

[siteunseen]

I read all the stories of broken rods and went back to rubber and poly versus all poly. Another I'll add is the nylon lock nuts on my car backed out and I had a loose TC rod. Lesson learned, use new lock nuts after backing them off once. Luckily I heard mine scraping in my driveway while backing out.

[gnosez]

Double nut or wire tie...that's what one single data point did to solve the issue.