Rear Track Bar (Panhard Bar)

The car feels like the chassis is attached to the wheels via licorice. Whilst the car looks nice it's not fun to drive. In fact after I stood on the side near the back of the car and oscillated the body laterally and watched the wheel rim with respect to the body and not only did is mostly stay put there was a really loud knocking noise. 3 guesses if you need them, well especially with the title of this one.

The axle is loose laterally with respect to the chassis and just floats around. It's nerve racking to drive. After I found that I parked it till it was fixed.

At first I thought it was an axle bearing or something funky with the axle internals but I crawled underneath and watched the track bar as I grabbed the fuel tank and shook the car. The bushings are annihilated.

I have a spare track bar, so I stripped and painted it and ordered some generic bushings as the bushings for this application are long discontinued.

These are the part number I found work best. You do have to do a little modifying, but what else is new.

The bushings are for a deeper mount. So you have sand, mill, or grind the excess off in the middle. You don't have to have to have them perfect, in fact you want a little gap in the middle so they compress normally when tightened and it also give a little spot to house the grease.

The ground down ones on the left.

The bushings are also too long, so either cut that down or use the original sleeves if they are intact as it save's time.

Grease with Teflon.

Replacement track bar all ready for installation.

The old one out of the XL.

The bushings, dare I call them that, were rock hard. There is no elasticity left in them. In fact they crumble when you touch them. It's like they are trying to revert back to carbon. There's the source of the knocking noise.

I changed it. Used the trans jack to lift up the axle to undo the shocks then lower minding the hydraulic brake hose and parking brake cable until I could just grab the coil springs out. The less stuff in the way the easier it is to move the axle around to get the refurbished track bar into position.