I had burned out the rubber in the passenger side rear trailing arm bushing and was pressing in the poly bushing when I noticed that the shell was shifting. It turned out that there was play between the bushing shell and the mounting ears on the axle. It looked like there was a gap large enough to fit a small nail. I considered doing just that to shim it up, but then remembered my tailpipe expander tool. So I expanded the shell as much as I could and it seemed pretty snug, although with torque I could still get it to spin. I put it all back together with the new poly bushings, but I fear it will loosen, start to clunk and then I'll have to get back under there and do a re-install with a new shell. Any thoughts? Similar experience?

Thanks,
Tom
'86 240 DL wagon 233k

new catalog from ipd shows an empty shell now being offered for those installing TA poly bushings. no need to burn the old rubber out. also available for front LCA poly installs.
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Tom - original owner '84-245na, ipd 25/25 sways, full gauge set, 288K miles and climbing

Could be one of the infamous aftermarket replacements, how thick was what's left of the rubber? Was there a couple of pieces of metal imbedded in the rubber in addition to the center bushing? See "ScanTech sucks" on my front page for pics of the most common RTA bushings with descriptions of each. One of the aftermarket bushings on that page was almost that loose.
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Dave Shannon
Spring Valley, California
'88-240 190K+
'65 1800S ????K
'73 1800ES 117K
'92 745Ti 160K
Jeep Wrangler Sahara 19K
my pages

Thanks for bringing that up. I meant to mention that these were actual Volvo bushings. They must have been replaced at some point because they were not totally destroyed and the car is at 233k miles. The rubber was cracking and peeling away a bit from the outer shell and they had started to clunk quite a bit. Thanks for your input,

Tom

Mine were really tight when I did my poly bushings a couple of months ago. Maybe yours were shot long enough to allow the clunking of the axle back & forth to hammer the hole in the axle ears oblong and allow play.

Maybe you could tack-weld it in place, or have someone do that for you.